Carl Jung: “Visions Seminar” – Quotations

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Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique. One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the feeling of being one sheep in the flock at least. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, page 625.

Don’t try to better than you are, otherwise the devil gets angry. Don’t try to be worse because God gets angry. Try to be what you are, that is acrobatics enough. ~C.G. Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol.1, page 235

So when one compares the Christian of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries with the Christian of the second century, there is all the difference in the world. Even if it were possible to confront Pius, the second Pope, with Professor Ritschl, the modern theologist, it would be impossible for them to understand one another. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 45

In the Middle Ages they were all most hellishly afraid of anything new. Only in 1846 did the Pope allow the earth to revolve around the sun-only since 1846 is that officially true. It was exactly the same in China.

There was a famous museum of European inventions in Peking, every new invention was collected, but they were put into the museum as curiosities, to show what those red devils were doing in barbarous lands; they never adopted them for themselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 149

Of course we cannot assume that God is exactly as we define him. He prefers to be himself, and what we say about him amounts to no more than what ants might have to say about Mussolini or the Pope. As we are untouched by the public opinion of an ant heap, so God is surely what he is and not what we say he is.

But what the ant heap has to say about its own highest principle, its own supreme factor, is exceedingly important, because that shows its conception of itself, and we can be sure that the ant heap will be influenced by the conception. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 172

There were plenty of opportunities for Christ to be mistaken for Dionysus besides his sacrificial death, and so Justinus Martyr claimed that Dionysus was the invention of the devil to counteract the intention of God. But on the other hand the church pointed out the Osiris-Isis myth as a positive anticipation of Christ. I have read a Catholic scientific work concerning this theory, which has received the sanction of the Pope. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

Mrs.: Baumann: But why did they make black Madonnas in the baroque times?

Dr.: Jung: I don’t know, I never found any good historical explanation for it, though I assume there would be a psychological reason. There would be an excellent reason for it just at that time in the fact that in the Renaissance the antique point of view came up again; we have evidence of the attempts of the church to revert to antiquity. The popes were then very near to the Roman Caesars, and the claim of the church to continue the Holy Roman Empire has never been given up. The pope’s title, pontifex maximus, belonged to the Roman emperors; Alexander VI, in particular, was just the Roman Caesar. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 527

Dr. Jung: It is usually part of a rite to celebrate a particular accomplishment, a victory, for instance, so it is a sort of thanksgiving-Te Deum laudamus. Or it is part of any moment that celebrates the triumph of the church; or a most solemn entrance of the pope or the cardinal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 532-533

There are .very intelligent historians who say that if only that man Luther had not been so serious about the whole business, the Popes would have led Christianity back into the most wonderful renaissance of antiquity. Sure enough, Alexander VI was on his way to it, he did his level best to go right back to the Roman Caesars, but unfortunately that northern monk threw a stone into his honorable attempt. But Luther or not, there would have been a reaction against it, it was still too early. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 767

The Pope’s ring contains a gem on which is carved the miraculous draught of fishes, symbolizing the shepherd-or the fisher-that draws the flock into the church. This fish meal was by no means Christian only; it occurred in other cults of those early days when Christianity was just one of a number of mystery cults. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 991

We see the same phenomenon in the Catholic church; the grandeur of St. Peter’s and the splendor of the Pope is the exterior representation of the most precious thing within. But the most precious thing is buried in it; when it has reached such a collective expression, it is then just the collective expression, and all the magic or divine power in the vajra has gone over into the power of the collective. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1347

The religious attitude, it is quite different, and above all it is not conscious. You can profess whatever you like consciously while your unconscious attitude is totally different. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 41.

You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within ourselves. It is our innermost nature and something between ourselves. The Kingdom of Heaven is between people like cement. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 444.

People with a narrow conscious life exteriorize their unconscious, they are continually in participation mystique with other people… if more unconscious things have become conscious to you, then you live less in participation mystique. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, para 1184.

Only those people who can really touch bottom can be human. Therefore Meister Eckhart says that one should not repent too much of one’s sins because it might keep one away from grace. One is only confronted with the spiritual experience when one is absolutely human. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 394

In the least the greatest will appear— such is your expectation. And that is the numen, the hint of the god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.

In the unconscious it is not so terribly important whether a man is alive or dead, that seems to make very little impression upon the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.

But your attitude to it matters, how you will take it, whether you believe in immortality or not, how you react to such and such an event, that matters to the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 903.

No matter what your conscious attitude may be, the unconscious has an absolutely free hand and can do what it pleases. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 27

The unconscious can make a fool of you in no time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 747

It is surely not the divine will in man that he should be something which he is not, for when one looks into nature, one sees that it is most definitely the divine will that everything should be what it is. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 569.

The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one. So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because it is and it is not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.

So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because it is and it is not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89.

So the Self is part of the collective unconscious, but it is not the collective unconscious; it is that unit which apparently comes from the union of the ego and the shadow. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

Just as the Self is a unit in the collective unconscious, so we are units in the Self. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

If there were no consciousness, there would be no world; the whole world, as far as it enters into our consideration, depends upon that little flame of consciousness, that is surely the decisive factor. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 898

In the unconscious one cannot judge because of the great darkness there, but in the conscious there is light, and so there are differences; there is a criterion in consciousness which gives one a measure by which to judge. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 898

The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 569.

To be fully aware of the shadow would be an almost superhuman task, but we can reach a certain optimum of consciousness; we should be aware to a much higher degree than we are now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 237.

We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 235

We substitute our ignorance with gas; modern people are all gas bags inasmuch as they are ignorant of what they really are. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 235

The animus is not created by the conscious, it is a creation of the unconscious, and therefore it is a personification of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 208

The animus is a sort of film between reality and a woman’s mind, she always talks about things as they should be, so when she says a thing is really so, it is really not so at all. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1228.

The animus when on his way, on his quest, is really a psychopompos, leading the soul back to the stars whence it came. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229

On the way back out of the existence in the flesh, the psychopompos [Animus] develops such a cosmic aspect, he wanders among the constellations, he leads the soul over the rainbow bridge into the blossoming fields of the stars. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1229

I could even go as far as to say that without the anima and animus there would be no object, no other human being, because you perceive differences only through that which is a likeness to the differences in yourself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1357

That tiny thing, that unique individual, the Self, is small as the point of a needle, yet because it is so small it is also greater than great. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 358

For not knowing about the unconscious means that one has deviated, one is not in harmony with it, and therefore it works against one. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 405

The animus is meant to be cosmic. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1228.

Is there any more beautiful love story than the love story of Mary? Wonderfully secret, divine, it is the only love affair of God that we know about. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 492

They [Children’s Dreams] must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they were born, and that is really vision. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

Individuals can be stunted all through their lives by a vision in childhood. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

Therefore the appearance of an archetype in our psychology is always a moment of the greatest danger as well as the greatest hope. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 67

But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424.

One often has dreams which seem destructive and evil, the thing one cannot accept, but it is merely due to the fact that one’s conscious attitude is wrong. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 405-406.

People have a transference to their analyst because they suppose that he is in possession of the treasure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 319

The principal pair of opposites is the conscious world and the unconscious world, and when the two come together, it is as if man and woman were coming together, the union of the male and the female, of the light and the darkness. Then a birth will take place. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 574

In the center is the individual where the opposites are united, the one peaceful spot in man, the space where nothing moves embedded in a world of chaos. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

For we may assume that the collective unconscious is in absolute peace until the individual appears. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

Therefore individuation is a sin; it is an assertion of one particle against the gods, and when that happens even the world of the gods is upset, then there is turmoil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

The day comes when you are outgrown and then you are approaching the void, which seems to me to be the most desirable thing, the thing which contains the most meaning. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1026.

The Eastern philosophy is a sort of yoga, it is alive, it is an art, the art of making something of oneself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1024

The great asset of the East is that they are based on instinct. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1066.
It is also the Eastern idea that through understanding one finds the roots of suffering. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 524.

This symbolic process within us, or that need to express unknown, unknowable, inexpressible facts, culminates in religion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 742-743

By removing yourself from the dogma you get into the world which is increasingly chaotic and primitive, in which you must find or create a new orientation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 905

It is tremendously important that people should be able to accept themselves; otherwise the will of God cannot be lived. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 391.

You cannot keep on the white side only, you have to admit that the spirit of life will at times take on the aspect of evil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 140

Even the Holy Ghost has to turn into a bird of prey in order to snatch the germ of life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 140

The experience of Tao can happen at any time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 761

The religious and moral and philosophical confusion, even the confusion in our art, is due to the World War. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 77

When pairs of opposites appear together it is like fire and water; it either means an immediate crash, a tremendous catastrophe, or that they merely counteract one another. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 647

For it is really true that if one creates a better relation to the unconscious, it proves to be a helpful power, it then has an activity of its own, it produces helpful dreams, and at times it really produces little miracles. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 604

Now to bring forth what the original will intended is really the task of a whole lifetime, a very serious undertaking. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 391.

The body is the past, our earth, the world of heretofore, but out of it rises a new light which is not identical with the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 374

Creation begins today, it has no history and no cause, creation is always creation from nothing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1035

In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280

If one has done one’s duty, fulfilled one’s task, one can then die, one can say goodbye and disappear. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 402

If one is allowed to speak of complete individuation at all, I should say that it would be conscious experience of the totality of nature. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 760-761

We are like onions with many skins, and we have to peel ourselves again and again in order to get at the real core. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 821

One cannot individuate as long as one is playing a role to oneself; the convictions one has about oneself are the most subtle form of persona and the most subtle obstacle against any true individuation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 821

Only if you first return to the body, to your earth, can individuation take place, only then does the thing become true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1314

Individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more. For you must have the consciousness of something before it can be intensified, and that means experience, life lived. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 757-758

People who live sterile lives are like that fig tree, they do not fulfill the will of the Lord. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 232

The way of nature will bring you quite naturally wherever you have to go. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 402-403

Therefore we say that if you give the little finger to the devil, he takes the whole arm, and finally the whole body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 93-94

If you are completely destroyed by the world, then the world which destroyed you must be completely transformed, because you looked upon it with the eye that transforms, the eye that contains the germ of what is new. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 361

You see, all that a man does, whatever he attempts, means his individuation, it is an accomplishment, a fulfillment of his possibilities; and one of his foremost possibilities is the attainment of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 759

But such a thing [Individuation] is only possible if the individual in every moment of existence fulfills his complete being, lives the primitive pattern, fulfills all the expectations that he was originally born with. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 760-761

We must give nature a chance to fulfill itself. Then only can we detach, and then it comes about quite naturally. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 402

A truth is only a truth when it lives, otherwise it is perfectly nonsensical; it must be able to change into its own opposite, to even become an untruth at times. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1311

Only when you behave exactly as you are meant to behave are you the friend and the brother of all living things; then you are right in your place, and then you suddenly understand that everything else is in its place. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 760-761

Yes, he cannot see our world, which means we are the eyes of that man who lives forever, because our consciousness is an eye that sees ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1016.

In this vision we find the same principle as in Buddhism, the consciousness of what is happening as a redeeming principle. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 322.

The anima behaves exactly like a definite person, yet she is also a function, her true function being the connection between the conscious and the unconscious; there the anima is in her right place. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 204-205

That is, she [Anima] is not in between myself and my audience, but in between myself and my unconscious audience, a mirror reflex of this world, the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 204-205

There again, those people who think of the unconscious as being a psychological tissue contained in one’s head are completely bewildered, for they can hardly form an idea of a tissue standing in one’s head. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 204-205

I do not believe in magic made by man, magic as made in Germany or in Great Britain or in America; it does not work. But I firmly believe in the natural magic of facts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1205

Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

Psychological energy does not exist, it is a concept, but in the physical or phenomenal equivalent of energy in these conditions we find the same peculiarity, namely, that this creative power is after a while exhausted, and then everything sinks back into the condition it was in before. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 118-119

If you just have a dream and let it pass by you, nothing has happened at all, even if it is the most amazing dream; but if you look at it with the purpose of trying to understand it, and succeed in understanding it, then you have taken it into the here and now, the body being a visible expression of the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316.

The earth is a microcosm in the great cosmos of the stars and we are ourselves microcosms upon the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

Each of us, every living being, is a small earth, one could say, because we are in intimate connection with the earth, we are partially earth, we are conscious of our earthly body, for instance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

The star symbol means the center of a mandala, and the meditation on the Self or the meditation on the mandala is prayer; in many different religions that concentration upon a point outside of oneself, not identical with oneself, is called prayer. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

One could not say that the ego was the microcosm because the ego is only the center or the focus of the individual consciousness, and consciousness reaches only as far as the conscious material reaches. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

There is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of things … inside is spirit, which is the soul of objects. Whether this is our psyche or the psyche of the universe we don’t know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars; Pages 164-165.

We must read the Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 156.

It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 193.

Yet in nature the animal is a well-behaved citizen. It is pious, it follows the path with great regularity, it does nothing extravagant. Only man is extravagant. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 168.

Machines are running away with us, they are demons; they are like those huge old saurians that existed when man was a sort of lizard-monkey and deadly afraid of their hooting and tooting. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 502

A big city is like a holocaust of humanity, as Zola expressed it. Man has built his own funeral pyre and it is destroying him, and so our whole world is being destroyed. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 502

Art is just a particular way of decorating the nest in which you lay your eggs. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 913-914

The center of that totality does not necessarily coincide with the ego system, just as the center of our galaxy of stars does not coincide with our sun, and the center of our solar system does not coincide with the earth; we cannot assume that our earth is the center of the universe. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

It was discovered long ago that the earth is in the periphery of something bigger, it is an appendix of the sun, and even the sun is an appendix of a larger system, a galaxy of unknown extent. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

We cannot think of our earth as a sun, nothing is revolving round us except perhaps the moon; the ego is a little system like the earth with the moon, but it is by no means the center of the universe. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

The Self is the center of the totality of the psyche in as far as we can measure it or have an intuition about it, or in as far as we have dreams about it, and surely beyond, for we cannot assume that we are informed through our dreams of everything that is happening in our psyche. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

For about twenty five years I have analysed about two thousand dreams or more every year,… ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Lecture II, Page 19.

If you have a foreign body in you, nature sends a host of special cells to assimilate it; if they don’t succeed in absorbing it, then there is suppuration to bring about expulsion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 19.

Probably in absolute reality there is no such thing as body and mind, but body and mind or soul are the same, the same life, subject to the same laws, and what the body does is happening in the mind. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 22.

These patients become much better Catholics after analysis; I have often taught Catholic patients how to confess. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Lecture II, Page 22.

We cannot even be certain that it is our own psyche; it might be, but there are many things in our unconscious, and we are by no means sure whether they really belong to us or to somebody else. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 1158-1159

I say that the unconscious says what it means. Nature is never diplomatic. If nature produces a tree, it is a tree and not a mistake for a dog. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 30.

Only men were admitted to the Mithraic ritual, the women all went to the Earth Mother. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 35

Only domesticated animals misbehave; a wild animal never misbehaves, it follows its own natural law; there is no such thing as a good tiger that eats only apples and carrots! ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 37

We must fulfil our destiny according to nature’s laws or we cannot become true servants of God. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 37

Don’t forget that Christ completely absorbed Mithras; that old Mithraic idea has been continued in Christianity through the middle ages up to recent times; bulls and even little lambs have been killed, everything that was animal has been killed throughout the ages. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 37

The occult stuff transcended his digestive powers, he suffered from mental indigestion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 41

This is a peculiar projection of our minds, this wanting to be free, not held down by any background: it is a sort of illusion of our consciousness in order to have the feeling of complete freedom, as if the historical past was fettering and would not allow free movement-a prejudice which again has psychological reasons. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 69

Our actual mind is the result of the work of thousands or perhaps a million years. There is a long history in every sentence, every word we speak has a tremendous history, every metaphor is full of historical symbolism; they would not carry at all if that were not true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 69

Animals understand utterances of fear of entirely different species because they have the same underlying fibre. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 70

I analysed dreams of Somali Negroes as if they were people of Zurich, with the exception of certain differences of languages and images. Where the primitives dream of crocodiles, pythons, buffaloes, and rhinoceroses, we dream of being run over by trains and automobiles. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 70

Scientists like to think that symbols have migrated. This is not true; they are quite autochthonous. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 71

If one studies the occult with the wrong attitude one can get infected, for this whole field is full of metaphysical traps through which one can fall, disappear as into an oubliette, and became the astrologer, the theosophist, or the black magician. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 72

No one approaches the Kingdom of Heaven without having passed through the flame and been burnt through and through. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 74

The new man of St. Paul’s early Christian teaching is exactly the same thing as the subtle body. It is an archetypal idea, exceedingly profound, which belongs to the sphere of the immortal archetypes. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 116

A real knowledge of Yoga practices is very rare in the West. I felt quite small when I became acquainted with these things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 118

Three-fourths of analyses are made by women, and I learn from them. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 122

Extraverts, and all people who are identified with their persona, hate to be alone because they begin to see themselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 75

Our spring point is at about 29° of Pisces and is no longer in Aries, although horoscopes are made on that basis. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 118

To the early Christians it was nothing to call a man a “Son of God,” it was a commonplace, it was their daily bread. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 117

When you come to that loneliness with yourself-when you are eternally alone-you are forced in upon yourself and are bound to become aware of your background. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 75

What is the use of a sin if you can throw it away? If you are thoroughly aware of your sin, you must carry it, live with it, it is yourself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 76

Even when you think you are alone and can do what you please, if you deny your shadow there will be a reaction from the mind that always is, from the man a million years old within you. You are never alone because the eyes of the centuries watch you; you feel at once that you are in the presence of the Old Man, and you feel your historical responsibility to the centuries. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 77

We never see the curative things that come from within; Christian Science recognizes them, but clinical medicine even in our day is living and working by the outer facts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 130

Those old doctors like Galen asked their patients for their dreams. Dreams played a large part in medical cures. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 130

One of my students made some experiments on the viscosity of the blood, following the viscosity through different stages of analysis. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 131

As our conscious personality is a part of the visible world, so our shadow side is a body in the collective unconscious, it is the unknown in things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 78

I said to her, “Who told you that you had an obligation to analysis? Your obligation is to life!” That girl is a victim of analysis. Her doctor is also stuck. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 86

It is death to the soul to become unconscious. People die before there is death of the body, because there is death in the soul. They are mask-like leeches, walking about like spectres ~~dead but sucking. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

There is no development under the law of conventional morality. It leads to compartment psychology, and how can a man develop when he forgets what his compartments contain? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 214

Yes, a man is never represented by himself alone. A man is only something in relation to other individuals. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

The unconscious is like a compass, it doesn’t tell you what to do. Unless you can read the compass it cannot help you. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 208

An introvert often keeps the events of his life in different compartments, he has a sort of wall between so they cannot blend. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 211

001 For the ultimate task of life, according to Hindu teaching, is that you take up your karma, that you work it out; otherwise it accumulates and you have it in the next existence-a hell of a time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 58

002 An intuitive will come to an impasse where his intuition serves him not at all; he needs sensation, the function of reality, in order to be able to continue his life; he has left too many situations unsolved, and finally he is overcome by them, nailed down by the unsolved problems, and only his reality function can help him. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 58

003 In the village where I lived as a child there was such a family. The mother was a typical witch. She caught birds, they ate ravens and danced on the nights of the full moon. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 60

004 People are always astonished when I say that the inferior function should be cared for as if it were a little child. It sounds all right, sentimental and wonderful, but when it comes to reality, it is another question, because your inferior function may suddenly take a course that you don’t like. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 63

005 The harvest is the reward for the early part of the year, so since time immemorial the miraculous child has been symbolized by the wheat. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 64

006 The point is that she touches here upon the archetype of mother love, the mother with child.

That is the archetype which underlies the Christian idea.

As you know, Isis and Osiris were often taken for Christian symbols.

The analogy between the Horus-Isis myth and the Jesus mystery was so obvious that the Catholic church was really

forced to account for it by the official teaching that the whole Horus myth was a legitimate anticipation of the coming of Christ; God allowed that good news to filter through several thousand years before it actually came off. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 65

We forget that the animal is the most pious thing that exists, the one thing besides plants that really fulfills its destiny, that fulfills the superior will, the will of God. We are of the devil because we are always deviating, always living something of our own. Animals live exactly as they were meant to live. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 72-88

007 In taking care of her own inferior function, she is lifted up to the likeness of the Madonna.

She is now the Mother of Pain and, at the same time, of the child; she is now that mystery, and therefore she is eternal, indestructible, nobody can reach her there.

That is the reason why there are altars and sanctuaries and cloisters where such identifications can take place; they are simply the exteriorized or concretized expression of that inner function of renewal through contact with the archetype. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 67

008 Therefore the appearance of an archetype in our psychology is always a moment of the greatest danger as well as the greatest hope.

It is a manifestation of extraordinary power, and all religions, as I said, are organized efforts to procure the contact. In the rites of the Catholic church, one sees that again and again: by putting people into contact with archetypes they produce the magic effect. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 67

009 Those black virgins are occasionally black Isis figures, with the specific meaning of the black goddess, an allusion to the black earth.

In an early Christian manuscript, St. Augustine said that the Virgin Mary was really the black earth not yet fecundated by torrents of rain; he used that simile in one of his sermons.

And there was the identity of Mary and the earth in the Eleusinian mysteries, so the black Mary is a relic of the past. There is a black Virgin at Einsiedeln, though they say it is black from the effect of a fire, but they always say that!

The fact is that there are a number of black Isis figures made of basalt that have served as Madonnas in Catholic churches.

Mary was the earth, the dark principle, but since that was close to the chthonic cult of Demeter, it was absolutely denied by the church. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 68

010 Now that is the meaning of the veiling of the unconscious side: be wise as the serpent.

This is one of the sayings in the New Testament that points the way to the new morality, the Gnostic morality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 71

011 But in the Mithraic cult they drank water instead of wine, because it was a religion of severe discipline, suited to soldiers.

And there was the great difference that women were excluded; that is one of the reasons for its downfall. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 79

012 But I have ample evidence that the same symbolism may occur in the dreams of people who know nothing about it.

I once dreamed about the Mithraic mystery myself without knowing that it was Mithraic. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 70

013 Human psychology today is as if people had learned absolutely nothing. German psychology remains the same.

And look at Italy! It is as if she had not lost half a million young men.

They are propagating like rabbits down there, in preparation. It is the psychology of despair. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminars Page 77

014 That is the reason why the Host must consist of flour of wheat, why Osiris is symbolized by wheat, and why in the Eleusinian mysteries, when the priest in the epopteia announced the birth of the god, he showed to the people an ear of wheat. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 64

015 So this dream of the apparition of the Virgin and Child, the Mother of God, has had the effect of giving the patient the feeling of invulnerability. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 66

016 Without the blackness of the earth, no wheat could be grown.

But here it is not a black face, it is a black veil, and the veil is not meant to make her face black.

That all virgins should wear veils in order to hide their beauty from the cupidity of man is an old idea which turned up in early Christianity; there is an interesting old book about the veiling of virgins.

It is the veiling of the sex element, as, for instance, women are not allowed to show their hair in church. In certain rites they have a special cloth or veil to cover the hair, because that is a secondary sex indication; it would bring black magic into the church, evil elementals would appear.

And such evils could be conjured up by the beauty of the face, therefore that should be veiled. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 69

017 This is one of the sayings in the New Testament that points the way to the new morality, the Gnostic morality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 71

018 I should like to put the question whether the distinction between the shaman and the saint cannot be referred to the anima relation, namely, that the power of the shaman comes from accepting the rule of the anima as the spirit of his metier, while the saint rigorously excludes the anima; although both are in fact determined by her. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89

019 The saint is a product of social and civilized differentiation, while a medicine man is a product of nature; he depends upon nature. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89

Dr. Baynes puts it as depending upon the anima, but the anima is nature, and the primitive medicine man is enveloped by the unconscious, he is part of it, the unconscious functions through him. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89

020 The unconscious on one side is nothing but nature, and on the other hand it is the overcoming of nature; it is yea and nay in itself, two things in one. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89

021 One sees this very clearly in the psychology of the Buddhist saint; by every word and every act he is overcoming the unconscious, overcoming the illusion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

022 And the Christian saint also overcomes the unconscious, he rises above it; to him the unconscious is the devil and he overcomes the devil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

023 Therefore most of the primitive shamans are sort of mediums; they get into a trance and work through that, which means, of course, the complete defeat of the human individual in his relationship to the unconscious powers. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

024 The Buddhist idea of nirvana is a nonexistent existence, or an existent nonexistence; it is not merely a nothingness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 91

025 The unconscious that wants to dismember everything, to disintegrate everything, to bring everything back into its beginning, is also creating the most beautiful jewel, the essence of synthesis, and that is so paradoxical that one is bewildered. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 91

026 The fathers of the church often spoke of these spelea as being in rocks; they were natural grottoes.

In some cases they were far below the surface; in a place in Syria there were three hundred and sixty-five steps to go down, which means that the initiate had to go back through a whole year in order to reach the chamber of initiation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 92

027 The intellect is something like a bird of prey; it seizes its object, tears it to pieces, and separates it from its surroundings, in order to acquaint itself with it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 96

028 The intellectual processes are really based upon separation; they are based upon endless acts of cruelty, cutting things down, excluding things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 96

029 Artists are not necessarily differentiated people; very often they are awfully primitive, the least differentiated.

For that very reason they are sort of idols to differentiated people, who get perfectly dry and sterile and are really craving for the artist, as the artist is craving for differentiation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 102

030 He is like the primitive man whose mind is in objects. Therefore the artist, not only in his creation, but also in his life, in his conduct, is very often an absolute victim of his unconscious, which cannot be said of the differentiated man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 103

031 Our mind evolved out of rivers, trees, hills, fruits, and we slowly brought it together by the process of abstraction. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 106

032TWe must look at these things from the standpoint of consciousness, and this woman’s consciousness would assume that spirit was above, and that there was no spirit in matter.

Here for the first time she becomes aware of the fact that spirit can also come from the earth, and it is the same Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost is by no means only an air bird, he is also a water bird. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 123

033 You remember the first vision was the peacock, and then came the symbol of the rising sun or the sun-man, the man with the halo.

The halo or nimbus expresses the sun-man, and therefore the Roman emperors were characterized by it.

But the saints are the real sons of the sun, they are crowned by the sun’s rays.

In the Mithraic mysteries, for instance, the initiate was crowned as a sun god, he was made into Helios, into the sun god himself, and worshipped as such. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 108

034 Now astrology may be quite unknown to your conscious mind, yet to your unconscious it is very intimately known; because the fundamental ideas of astrology, the signs of the zodiac, for instance, are projections onto the skies of our unconscious functioning. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 109

035 The qualities of the different months of the year, in other words, the signs of the zodiac, are really the projections of our unconscious knowledge of time and the qualities of time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 109

036 A breeder of cats, for instance, will tell you that cats born in the spring are different from cats born in the fall.

And a connoisseur of antiquities will tell you that certain objects must date between 1420 and 1450, say; anything that originated then has the quality of that time.

An astrologer has merely a more detailed knowledge, he is able to tell you that a thing originated in such and such a month without any further knowledge of the qualities of the object. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 109-110

037 While the primitive medicine man is, essentially, the power of illusion, he himself is at the same time the subject of the power of imagination and of illusion and is made to work through it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

038 The first is that of a man, like anybody, but one must recognize him, and only those people who can chant the chapters of the Koran are able to recognize him.

Then one must step up to him and say, “Salem Alaikum,” Peace be with thee, and he will say, “Alaikum Salaam,” and all one’s wishes will be granted.

The second way that God appears is as a pure white light, not like a flame, not like a fire or a lantern, but a pure white light.

And to explain the third form, my head man smiled and picked up a blade of grass, saying: “God can appear like that.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 111

039 So we shall never understand what the unconscious is, as we shall never understand what the world is, because it is and it is not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 89

040 Also there is a painting of the mummy case of Osiris, the god of the underworld, with wheat growing all over him, out of his body and out of the mummy case.

And, you remember, the reason why the Host in the communion must consist of wheat flour is because Christ is the son of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 111

041 Well, China is the far East, the place where the sun rises, Japan calls herself the land of the rising sun, and the Chinaman is the antipode to the white man; what is black with us is white with them. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 116

042 Of course, psychological energy does not exist, it is a concept, but in the physical or phenomenal equivalent of energy in these conditions we find the same peculiarity, namely, that this creative power is after a while exhausted, and then everything sinks back into the condition it was in before. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 118

043 In the Tantric system the ram is a force that is located in the abdomen, while the bird has to do with the head; winged things inhabit the head, thoughts flutter about like birds. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 119

044 The devil is always represented as the darkness itself; he has not the ram’s head, but he has the horns of the he-goat and the goat’s hoofs; he is half animal, a sort of satyr.

In the Middle Ages he was also a phallic god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 120

045 We are apt to be tremendously pleased with such Eastern philosophy; the sayings of Lao-tze are most impressive and we like to quote them, not realizing that we are putting on a garment which does not belong to us. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 120

046 We must look at these things from the standpoint of consciousness, and this woman’s consciousness would assume that spirit was above, and that there was no spirit in matter.

Here for the first time she becomes aware of the fact that spirit can also come from the earth, and it is the same Holy Ghost.

The Holy Ghost is by no means only an air bird, he is also a water bird. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 123

047 The animus impersonates the unconscious, as the anima impersonates it in a man’s case.

One could say the anima was the woman who emerges from the water, like Aphrodite arising from the foam of the sea in a shell.

And the animus is also in a way a spirit that hovers over the black waters and is often represented as such; I have two pictures in my collection where the animus is depicted as a huge black bird hovering over the primordial waters. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 124

048 Just as you are quite convinced in reality that the things behind your back are no less real than those in your field of vision, although you don’t see them, so your conception of the collective unconscious should be that it is an invisible reality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 126

049 The inside of things is unknown, unconscious, and there, wherever you touch, is the collective unconscious; it is all over the place, outside as well as inside of you, it is the unknown reality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 126

050 Since the animus is more or less the counterpart of the persona, the animus is in your unconscious life what the persona is in your conscious life-of course, in a woman’s case. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 125

051 Just as much as you are possessed by the persona, are you, unconsciously, an animus-possessed being.

You see, there are women who think they really are just what they seem to themselves to be and what they appear to be to other people, but that is a tremendous illusion.

Such women are possessed by their animus, by their opinions; any woman who believes that she is identical

with her persona is invariably an animus hound. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 126

052 Only the animal man can be possessed.

The man who is possessed by the anima and the woman who is possessed by the animus are just beasts.

It is easier to talk or to argue with a dog or a cow than with someone possessed by such a figure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 126

One should invent a term for the man possessed by the anima.

053 I must leave that for a clever woman to suggest. I cannot do it for my own sex.

The natural function of the animus is not to possess the human being, because the human being is supposed to be human, thus far divine and creative; the possession of at least two functions guarantees a nature that is at least approximately divine. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 127

054 If the animus or the anima are in their proper place they cannot possess the human being; instead, the human being is in control.

The human being is then superior to those figures, as he-or she-is superior to the appearances of the persona. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 127

055 And Hermes, the winged god, is a bird-man, a messenger, and he is also the god of the thieves; it is a peculiarity of birds that they suddenly swoop down and take something off-that is another kind of descent. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 130

056 So the natural function of the animus is to remain in his place between the individual consciousness and the collective unconscious, exactly as the persona is a sort of stratum between the ego consciousness and the objects of the external world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 127

057 But when you come before God, all your knowledge and all your beauty amount to nothing, all the values that count in the world are nothing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 129

058 The Docetic conception was that no god was ever sacrificed, that it would have been quite impossible to sacrifice a god; it was an ordinary poor man who was sacrificed-he was abandoned by the white bird. An entirely psychological viewpoint, and like most of those early heresies, beautifully human ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 131

That is the reason why the ancients were quite convinced that the figure of the god answered or moved his head, although the idol was of stone. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 123

060 There are certain difficult situations in life when everything you have learned, everything you have slowly built up, crumbles away, nothing helps; and then you have a most foolish little idea or hunch and you go by that. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 133

061 So people who can follow their instincts are much better protected than by all the wisdom of the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 133

062 The earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own, and there is enough to indulge in besides sexuality. The natural mind has the world of earthly beauty to itself really. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 133-134

063 The animus is not meant to live in the depths of the unconscious, he is meant to live on the surface of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 134

064 Christianity is the last word of mankind in the tremendous attempt to formulate the mysteries of the soul, and knowing nothing better we should acknowledge that we are still there; whether we like it or dislike it makes no difference at all, we are still there. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 135

065 You know the dove is relatively weak and harmless, but the hawk is a wicked bird of prey.

Yet it is also a divine bird, it is the bird of Horus, the Egyptian Christ, and the official Catholic teaching is that the Egyptian myth was an anticipation of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 135-136

066 We are not used to thinking of the Holy Ghost as taking anything from the earth, as taking something from below, but always as bringing something down to the earth, such as the immortal feat, the miracle of transformation, the heavenly fire, or the generative power from God into man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 136

067 Meister Eckhart wrote a beautiful sermon about repentance in which he said one should not waste too much time on repenting one’s sins because out of the night comes day; out of error, truth; and out of sin, forgiveness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 136-137

068 Mind you, nobody would doubt that Christianity was a very good thing for the four hundred millions, but it might be the worst thing for a particular individual; for him it might mean utter destruction. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 138

069 That is still true in the East, there are many good examples of what the Lord can do for people in that line, a man standing with his hair like a bird’s nest on his head, for instance, eaten up with vermin.

And think of the lives of those greatest saints, the Tibetan monks who have themselves walled in for sixty or

seventy years until they shrivel up.

One man was walled in for seventy-two years and died in the wall; he had atrophied completely and decreased to a third of his height. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 139

070 For it is the spirit of ecstasy, of enthusiasm, and no life is really lived without enthusiasm; you could put yourself into a box just as well and be buried.

Life is only worthwhile if lived with enthusiasm. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 139-140

071 Life consists of night and day, and the night is just as long as the day; so evil and good are pairs of opposites without which there is no energy and no life.

The unconscious is the illusion and he is in a state beyond illusion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

072 While the primitive medicine man is, essentially, the power of illusion, he himself is at the same time the subject of the power of imagination and of illusion and is made to work through it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

073 They are the Yang and the Yin and they are necessary.

Even the Holy Ghost has to turn into a bird of prey in order to snatch the germ of life.

The content of life is not always above, sometimes it is below.

That is the important truth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 140

074 The unconscious is the illusion and he is in a state beyond illusion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 90

075 The next thing is that the bird flies to the woman dressed in blue, who is sitting like an ancient statue, and settles down on her hands.

You will remember the picture of it.

The woman holds a grain of wheat which the bird takes in its beak and then flies again up into the sky.

The woman dressed in blue is a peculiar mixture of the Christian celestial mother and, on account of the wheat, of Demeter and Isis.

Inasmuch as the Host must consist of wheat, there is a connection with Christ as well as with Iacchus and Osiris (being the resurrected wheat).

The scene of the white bird coming down upon the mother is an unmistakable parallel to the conceptio immaculata, since the Holy Ghost is depicted as a dove. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 141

076 Through the picture of the immaculate conception the germ of life has been deposited in the stream of blood; thus it has been inserted into the sphere of the instincts and thereby something like a pregnancy begins, in which the patient is her own child. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 142

077 This is very typical of the beginning of visions: it begins at the bottom, as it were, as if the whole world had to be built anew, or as if nothing had ever happened before; and then it carries the thought through until it reaches the stage that is not yet and that never has been: it reaches the future. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 142

078 It is very much like a biblical scene, like Moses on Mount Sinai, for instance, with the people down below worshipping the divine miracle; they all have their arms outstretched to the Indian as if in supplication, so we must assume that the animus as well as the bull have taken on a spiritual or divine significance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 143

079 As we are expecting the manifestation as the children of God, a revelation of the Holy Ghost within us, so all creation, even the animals and the plants, are waiting for it too; that spiritual miracle of redemption or completion which happens in man means the crowning of all nature at the same time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 144

080 The idea is that man is the representative of the whole of creation, and whatever happens to him happens in a magic way to the whole world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 144

081 That brings us to a very paradoxical idea: you see, on this plane of consciousness we feel single and as if collectivity were just the opposite.

Inside it is different, there is a multitude, and there the situation is reversed: it is as if we were the multitude there, and as if the Indian on his bull were opposed to us. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 145

082 When you really get in touch with these figures in the collective unconscious, you feel how terribly real they are and how utterly ungovernable. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 145

083 There is the fact that rays are still wandering in the sky which portray, say, the French Revolution.

You still could see the light of the guns of the World War at a certain distance from the earth, because light has a limited speed.

So somewhere out in space you can go back in history.

If you could put yourself at a distance of only about four hundred light years from the earth, you would see Columbus discovering America; if you had a good telescope you could see him just now landing.

You could see the destruction of Mexico, and the great fire of Rome if you could take your stand about two thousand five hundred light years away and had a particularly good telescope. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 146

084 In the mysteries, veiling means that the initiate dies, and the unveiling means the resurrection.

So for a nun to take the veil means that she is dying to the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 148

085 The eyes of very primitive and unconscious men have the same strange expression of a mental state before consciousness, which is neither pain nor pleasure; one doesn’t know exactly what it is.

It is most bewildering, but undoubtedly here she sees into the very soul of the animal, and that is the experience she should have. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 154

086 One could say that these are the eyes of the beginning, of the creator, who was unconscious because in the beginning all was unconsciousness.

One cannot know what it is in itself because, from our standpoint, an animal has no consciousness, it is exactly what we call unconsciousness.

I cannot go into a philosophical discussion about it, but it is quite possible that in what we call the unconscious-the sum of autonomous contents-each of those contents has a consciousness in itself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 154

087 So wherever there is such a center it is quite possible that there is consciousness; therefore what we call the unconscious would be another form of consciousness of something else in somebody else. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 154

088 But we can at least imagine that getting as deep as that, down below all history, into the regions of the blood, must be rather an overwhelming experience; for there one enters a mental or psychological sphere that is still at one with nature, and that is an utterly different thing from our consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 155

089 There had been, before, the descent into the past, the descent through the ages into primitive culture, till finally she had that vision of looking into the eyes of the animal; in other words, she reached a sort of animal consciousness, a most remote instinctive feeling amounting to almost complete unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 171-172

090 But what the ant heap has to say about its own highest principle, its own supreme factor, is exceedingly important, because that shows its conception of itself, and we can be sure that the ant heap will be influenced by the conception. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 172

091 When we say our God is love, we know it is not true.

We say that in order to compensate for the fact that we do not love enough, that we hate too much. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 172

092 For instance, the cleanest, purest religion-literally clean, on account of its numerous washing ceremonials-is the Persian religion, and the Persians were known throughout the antique world as the dirtiest dogs that ever existed; their religion was compensatory.

The most fanatical monotheists were the Jews, and it was the Jews who always fell for the foreign gods. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 172

093 This is again the vine, the Dionysian principle, the fruit of the earth, that is growing into the church.

The altar is where one drinks the wine, the spirit of the earth, and it is assumed that the wine is inspiring, that it gives one good thoughts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 173

094 Now this vision of the god Pan is a part of the initiation; it is the experience of the living presence, of the absolutely objective psyche. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 174

095 But if you can train yourself to take psychical contents as objective, you will feel a presence.

For then you know that the psychical contents are not things you have made, they really occur, they are there, and so you are not alone; then you can be in perfectly good company, most entertaining company. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 174

096 In the psychical world, one can experience two suns, split the universe in twelve parts if one pleases, because there physical facts have no value.

But one must know that one is in an abnormal condition, and be able to switch it off and get into one’s so-called normal condition again. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 179

097 I am no Catholic, my father was a Protestant clergyman, so I know something about Protestantism, and it is not a real religion, it is a protest against a real religion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 178

098 But if one studies antique or primitive religions, one sees how those people were given the opportunity of an exalted life and had cause to remember it; and inasmuch as there have always been such religions or such ritual forms, we can say that there has always been an absolute need in man for that dual life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 180

099 But in the exalted condition they could feel the blessing of heaven upon what was a horrible crime; to them it was an act of the greatest devotion.

In the excavations of old Carthage they found a series of pots in the temple of Astarte containing the remains of hundreds of slaughtered little children that had been sacrificed to the goddess.

That was not mere cruelty, it was great devotion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 184

100 But the baptism of the adult was originally a very serious business, so it had to be in a mysterious and secluded place, where the few who were present were in the proper mood. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 180

101 You notice that I say physical or conventional and perhaps you are astonished that I make them practically identical.

But convention is nothing but the average truth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 181

102 People are always complaining that other people are unkind and unfriendly with them.

But look at them! They are the unkind and unfriendly ones, and naturally they bring that out in others. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 185

103 In the higher states of exaltation one really does forget oneself, but that is not only the self-forgetfulness arising from some form of intoxication.

That could be said of the Dionysian cult, but in Indian psychology it is a consequence of the detachment of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 186

104 And when consciousness becomes detached from objects, the particular object does not matter so much.

This accounts for the Eastern attitude of indifference, which on the practical side has bad consequences; human life and health do not matter enough, they are far too much disregarded. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 186

105 I don’t know exactly what the reasons are, but if you ask people what they consider the most important

event in their lives, if they are not confined to common sense only, they usually tell you particular experiences which clearly indicate an exalted condition.

Therefore it has often been said that nothing matters but the union with God, or heaven, or something of the sort.

And so the relationship on the exalted level reaches into greater depths, it is unforgettable, it burns itself into the flesh. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 181

106 As long as they are done within the mystery and are understood as a holy ritual, they are not perversities; but the moment they are seen under a more human or banal aspect, they become perversities.

Like throwing the children to Moloch.

That might be called ordinary murder and a terrible perversity, and then it would be perversity.

But before that it was a divine sacrifice and most efficacious because it was real; it was not murder, because in that exalted condition it meant something most wonderful. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 184

107 As I told you, the youth in the leopard skin is again the animus, who now realizes a sort of divine enthusiasm, he is starting out on a new adventure.

You have already seen that the animus is practically always sent ahead when our patient is faced with a particularly difficult undertaking. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 187

108 The opinions of a woman are also not very human; they have something of the coldness of the cosmic spaces because they are apart from herself, they are from the collective unconscious, beyond the warmth of the human individual. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 188

109 This is simply a demonstration of two contrasting movements: the Dionysian or extraverted way, leaping into things, jumping over obstacles, slurring over difficult facts; and the other principle, the introverted or Apollonian principle, doing nothing, not moving on, not being enthusiastic, but being contemplative. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 189

110 So it is better to contemplate with blind eyes, with the eye turned inward, that is.

The white eye means an ecstatic condition in which the pupil is turned up and disappears under the lid.

By turning the eye inward, one prevents the intellect from seeing things too closely or too acutely and thus destroying them.

One should never look at things in a seeing way if one wants them to grow; it is much better to be deaf in one ear and blind in one eye than to have too acute and concise perceptions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 190

The seeing eye of the intellect perceives most accurately, yet it kills the growth; it has the quality of the eye of the basilisk, which-according to the legend shriveled up whatever he looked at. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 190

111 For quite long enough our ancestors, and we ourselves, have been taught that this life is not the real thing, that it is provisional, and that we only live for Heaven.

Our morality is based upon the negation of the flesh, and so our unconscious often tries to convince us of the importance of living here and now.

In the course of the centuries man has repeatedly experienced the fact that the life that is not lived here, or the life lived provisionally, is utterly unsatisfactory. It leads into neurosis. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 193

112 The ancient mother, as I said, means the earth, and the earth psychologically means the body, the corporeal sphere of our psychology, as it were, where the psyche is detached from the psychological and touches the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 195

113 Beholding the image of the deity has the magic effect of deification; that is the reason why icons have always been used in churches.

In Catholic churches praying to the image of the saint is still a means of acquiring spiritual merit, it draws grace down upon the worshipper. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 195

114 The first sign of the zodiac, the sign of the renewed sun after the winter solstice, is Capricorn, the aigkeros, a Babylonian symbol. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 197

115 There are stories about the initiates of the Dionysian cult-particularly the women, the maenads-having done very bloody things, tearing the living flesh of deer or young goats with their teeth, for instance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 197

116 Our patient’s animus has been exalted to a divine condition through the immediate neighborhood of the satyr, that powerful fetish, from whom he received a lot of grace or mana and became deified himself, and then naturally got into that Dionysian condition; but he was checked by the Apollonian principle and had to go down to be washed in the waters. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 198

117 There is an astrological interpretation of Delilah as the sign of Virgo, in which the sun loses its power, Virgo being followed by the autumnal equinox when the sun is definitely becoming weaker; the sun then loses its hair, its rays.

118 So the hair is understood to be an emanation of the head, having to do with the mind and the most spiritual as well as magical forces.

Black hair gives the idea of darkness, black thought, or an obscured mind; and golden hair means shining with bright thought or consciousness. In the state of exaltation one loses consciousness of oneself and one’s mind becomes obscure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 198-199

119 Figures in the unconscious are to be considered as mere functions, yet they are also in a way personal factors, because nothing in the unconscious is abstract, it is all personal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 203

120 That is also true of the voices which lunatics hear; they speak in a personal way, and the more distinct they are, the more it is a matter of functional dissociation, or even of a real psychosis. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 204

121 The animus is in this respect rather difficult to deal with because it is a plurality.

One can compare the animus, as I have said, to a group of people, a court, or a limited company, or an organization; while the anima is very definitely one person and therefore more clearly to be seen.

122 We are bewildered by the concept of the collective unconscious, and therefore I say: You should not begin at those abstract ideas of functions and archetypes; in order to have a correct idea of its nature, you should begin at the very simple idea of ghosts, or the souls of objects, say, or thought forms. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 205

123 For practical uses, it is really best-though terribly shocking, I admit-to assume that everything has a double existence: a known tangible surface and at the same time an invisible, unknown existence. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 206

124 The best thing is, as I say, to assume that we are standing in between two worlds, a visible tangible world, and the other invisible world, which somehow has a peculiar quality of substantiality; but very subtle, a sort of matter that is not obvious and is not visible, that penetrates bodies and apparently exists outside of time and space. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 206

125 It (Collective Unconscious) is here and everywhere at the same time, and yet nowhere because it has no extension; it is a complete annihilation of space and time, which makes it a very different thing from our conception of an obvious world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 206

126 So when you are concerned with a relationship to another human being, you are in connection with two things really, with the conscious obvious person and the unconscious person at the same time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 205

127 My anima may twist my impressions of reality, and she may twist my image in the eyes of the object.

It is like a moving, deceitful thing in between oneself and reality if wrongly placed.

But the anima as a bridge, as a function of relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, is rightly placed. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 207

128 There is only one collective unconscious, it is always one and the same, so if my anima is rightly placed behind my back, between the collective unconscious and the conscious, then the relationship is right everywhere. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 207

129 The gods, the spirits, the demons are all illusions according to the Eastern idea.

Yet they are real inasmuch as you can perceive them.

When you have penetrated those veils, you are right at the one thing and there are no such discrete particles any longer. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 208

130 You see, the animus is not created by the conscious, it is a creation of the unconscious, and therefore it is a personification of the unconscious. It is the gate to the collective unconscious, and by a certain attitude one can provoke that function to appear; but if it returns to itself, pulls up the bridge, that locks the gate. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 208

131 Already in 1904 I remember writing to Freud to tell him that what he called repression was often not exactly repression, because there were many cases where one could not find any traces of it.

I said it was an automatic function which had its roots in the unconscious and where the conscious is a perfectly detached spectator. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 209

132 The very primitive man is still identical with the collective unconscious, he is just a piece of this world, a part of visible nature, and values himself as one among the other animals; so he is like an indistinguishable part of the collective unconscious and naturally there is no such dissociation as with us. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 211

133 The sorcerer or medicine man is himself such a link; he deals with ghosts and if anything difficult occurs, say a war or a pestilence, he has recourse to that method; that is, he tries to reestablish the lost connection with the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 209

134 Therefore those many Eastern pictures where the holy man in his meditation is visited by all sorts of animals, and birds fly down and alight on him. So here, all alone with herself, she is together with her instincts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 213

135 For the Self in that divine form is the balance and the necessary counterpart to the animal instincts.

So the figure of the Self is the divine above and the animal below, like the vision of the satyr-god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 213

136 Through being with the animals, one is lower down than the brain, because the farther one reaches back into the ages, the more one has the animal feeling, the intuition of what the animal is. One might go back even to the lizard, farther than the warm-blooded animal, where one probably loses consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 213

137 The purpose of the antique mysteries was to make the initiate into Helios; the upshot of the whole mystery ceremonial was that the initiate should become the sun itself, like Apuleius in The Golden Ass. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 215

138 So the next thing we could expect would be an attempt at reconstructing the Christian experience in an entirely new way, as we have already seen the reconstruction of the Dionysian experience, which is as a modern person would experience those things; and still it is amazingly like the accounts of the experiences at Eleusis. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 216

139 That is what Synesius held: that when the spiritus phantasticus in man, his creative fantasy, reaches beyond man in every respect, below or above, he really becomes divine. Then he says something extraordinary: “And being divine, as such he has to undergo the divine punishment.” And the divine punishment is dismemberment. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 217

140 You see, the religious experience of antiquity was the experience of the individual as being divine; that was the enormous discovery they made and that was a living truth to them.

They probably said to one another: Have we not been gods together?

And it was a tremendous thing; they were exalted, they were no longer little citizens, they were lifted up to a higher condition, as the Christians were through baptism. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 217

141 And inside, the walls are covered with representations of the inner events of his life, showing how he is born from the god-mother, etc.; he functions there as a sort of mediator between human beings and the gods.

So there was already the idea of the mediator, that was also an anticipation of Christ really; the pharaoh was a messiah, the son of God, the twice-born. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

142 It is like the Christ myth; the baptism of Christ in the Jordan was the second birth.

Also the myth of Dionysus is in a way an anticipation: after he was dismembered by the Titans, Hera gave his heart to his father, Zeus, who swallowed it.

Then his wife Semele gave birth to the new Dionysus. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

143 It is true that Christ performed the same miracles that were usually performed in the temples of Dionysus, such as the transformation of water into wine; and there are representations of Christ that are like Dionysus. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

144 A famous goblet (which is now in a safe in America) was found down in a well in Damascus, probably having been hidden there in the sixth century, as part of the treasure belonging to a church, during the persecution of Julian the Apostate.

The goblet is of very thin hammered silver, argent repousse, and on it Christ is depicted sitting in a sort of pergola of grapevines and looking exactly like Dionysus. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 219

145 Originally human beings were sacrificed, and then animals, and then the fruits of the field, and finally in India the sacrifice has become a mere gesture, decorating the altar with flowers.

Nowadays the sacrifice that we bring before the altar consists mainly of ten-cent pieces; it has completely degenerated. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 220

146 Therefore the next sacrifice was of exactly the experience which was the real spiritual life of antiquity.

That was completely abolished.

I put that very strongly because we are in a time now where the old things are again beginning to crumble away, so we should not imagine, if anything new comes, that it will come with sugar or honey. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 220

147 We have no historical evidence, as far as my knowledge goes, except that concerned with the Black Mass; in the Black Mass, children were really sacrificed as late as the seventeenth century.

There is historical evidence that Madame de Montespan sacrificed three

children in order to retain the king’s love. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 223

The Black Mass originated in the thirteenth century, or near that time, when there was war and famine and terrible epidemics.

148 Everything went wrong, so people lost their belief in the good will of God; and since God was not helpful they thought the devil might do something for humanity, and therefore they celebrated the Black Mass. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 223

149 We know that sacrifices of children were very frequent in early antiquity.

For instance, when the French excavated the temple of Astarte at Carthage, they found hundreds of skulls of little children, which is evidence that child sacrifices were often carried out there. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 223

150 For instance, there was a rumor that the early Christians sacrificed children in their ceremonials.

The Romans told that story in order to disqualify the Christian heresy which was so horrible to them; for those Christians worshipped an awful god that was hanging on a cross, and that was only done to criminals. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 223

151 Dr. Baynes: Is it not possible that the projection upon the Jews in the Middle Ages of the idea of child murder comes from this pagan root?

Dr. Jung: Absolutely. That idea of the ritual murder of little children was projected onto the Jews in the Middle Ages and in Russia just before the war. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 224

152 On 25 December we put lights on our Christmas tree in order that the sun may rise; and we have an evergreen tree so that it will bring forth fruit; it is a magic ceremonial to produce or increase the sun.

It has now become a sort of festival that produces Christ again, it is the birthday of Jesus.

But that was originally the birthday of Mithra, the invincible sun-it is a borrowed birthday. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 225

153 As I explained, the Christian necessity of self-sacrifice was on account of the antique assumption of being divine. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 226

154 So if the leg or the tail of a salamander is cut off, it makes a new one, but a bit less differentiated, a bit more archaic.

Apparently that is happening in Russia since they did away with their more or less civilized religion.

And so in this case what comes up from the collective unconscious as a sort of restitution is far more primitive than the highly evolved symbolism of the Catholic church, but the advantage is that it is thoroughly alive, immediately impressive, and the historical symbolism does not work any longer for most educated people. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 227

155 The entrails and the liver, then, were supposed to be the seat of psychic life and of secret knowledge; they were the seat of the abdominal soul, as the brain to us represents the seat of consciousness.

You see, we identify brain and consciousness more or less; we assume that our consciousness is located in the brain, but the consciousness of those very primitive people was located decidedly below the brain.

In the time of Homer-astonishingly enough to us as boys-the psychical centre was located in the diaphragm, as I told you recently. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 228

156 And I know of a number of cases of abdominal disturbances because people did not do what they should

have done, people who got a bit lazy, for instance, who really should have organized their lives on a somewhat larger scale perhaps. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 229

157 So the abdomen is the most primitive localization we know of, though Indian speculation goes a little deeper. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 229

158 In those days all the early teachers, like Christ or John the Baptist, were concerned with the same task which we unfortunate analysts are concerned with.

We must make people conscious, we must fight against that gregariousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 229

159 Yes, blood always means the life force, it is the symbol of the soul.

According to primitive belief, blood is the real seat of life; therefore

drinking the blood of an enemy is supposed to give one his mana. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 231

160 You can make extraordinary discoveries about the psychology of women from the rings they wear, you could

almost make an analysis. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 231

161 Christ himself condemned that which bears no fruit, when he cursed the barren fig tree.

People who live sterile lives are like that fig tree, they do not fulfill the will of the Lord. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 232

162 But you go to the psychoanalyst just to find out what you are. That is another mistake of our times.

We are inflated because we don’t know or because we have forgotten what we are.

We substitute our ignorance with gas; modern people are all gas bags inasmuch as they are ignorant of what they really are. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 235

163 We have now taken to investigating the psychology of non-European peoples, so we learn what they think about us; we make the discovery that we are bloodhounds or pirates, all sorts of evil things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 235

164 You see, the phenomena of the uncontrollable animus and anima are absolute tests from which to measure the degree of distance between your conscious and your shadow.

In order to control your anima or your animus, you must bring the shadow close to consciousness and so liberate the shadow from their possession. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 237

165 Mrs. Baynes asked me to tell you that Watkins is publishing a new edition of Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, by Mead, a standard work on Gnosticism.

There is no other book that can compare with it, it is written with love and great understanding.

There is a certain admixture of theosophy, but one hopes that this will have disappeared in the new

edition. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 237

166 One might say that Gnosticism was the first systematic attempt to formulate basic psychological facts and therefore it should be particularly interesting to us… There is nothing in German equal to this book by Mead; it is well worth reading. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 237

167 The animus showed her she should sacrifice the divine lamb, meaning a sort of self-sacrifice-that is, her participation in the divine totem animal-and the animi were performing that ceremony. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 240

168 We are not ideal, we are in the flesh; we are not only eternal spirits living on the tops of skyscrapers,

we are living on this earth; so if anything is to be solved, it should necessarily be solved on this earth here and now, not somewhere in a future heaven. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 242

169 People must be initiated or baptized into that which they are not, or which they do not possess and which they ought to possess. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 240

170 When people have such a vivid experience, it is as if the unconscious were emphasizing it by the additional quality of sensation in order to make the thing absolutely real. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 241

171 You see being in the blood means being in the instincts, being in primitive man, and in the animals that lived before primitive man, being in nature as it always was.

Then only does one realize that appalling fear which we have escaped through civilization. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 241

172 You see, it is not so simple for civilized man to reach reality.

For most civilized people reality is a sort of dream, far away. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 242

173 The man who discovered the mathematical law of the spiral is buried in my native town, Basel, and on his tombstone a spiral is carved with this very significant and beautiful inscription: “eiidem mutiitii resurgo,” which means, literally translated: in an identical way, changed, I lift myself up. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 243

174 She passed out of Christianity in the former visions and went deep down to the animal; then she came up again through antique cults, and we have just left the area where she realized the deification of the sun, Helios. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 244

175 The early Christians in Asia Minor were still sun-worshippers, and that was true in certain places in Italy.

Christ was supposed to be the newly risen sun. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 244

176 There is a mana that is peculiar to gold, as there is a mana that is peculiar to silver, and a mana peculiar to precious stones.

They have an intrinsic value which people cannot deny. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 244

177 But people can be lured by precious stones and gold because it has a real effect upon human beings.

Also on animals: magpies steal golden rings and stones to decorate their nests because they find them beautiful; they don’t believe in the exchange theory of merchandise, they believe in the obvious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 247

178 The details in dreams often lead to certain implications, subtleties, which we are unable to understand; limitations enter into them which it is impossible to discern.

But in visions there are, relatively, more simple conditions: on the one side we have the very complex fact of the unconscious, but on the other side we have the conscious, and the impact of the two-the clash of the two-brings about the fantasy.

So the vision is always clearer, more accessible to interpretation than the dream. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 247

179 As you know, life develops mainly in either the animal form or the plant form, and since we all belong to the same life, plants and animals belong together.

Moreover we live on plants, we are parasites on the forests of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 248

180 In other words, the life of the plant is also within us, and it becomes the symbol for a sort of nonbiological quality, for the thing we call spirituality.

Plant life becomes the symbol for spiritual life. The unfolding of the spirit is based upon the analogies of plant life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 250

181 The soul is always supposed to come out of the mouth, the spirit comes out of words.

Words are air-bodies, invisible sounds, so they are assumed to be spirit.

But those are all animal misconstructions, for the true spiritual things are absolutely invisible to us, they are the antipodal principle to us, the principle of plant life which is entirely contrary, a different form of life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 249

182 Think of the manifestation of the spirit of Islam, of Christianity-many rivers of blood spilled-because the life of the plant has a different growth from that of the animal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 251

183 Dr. Barker: There seems to be an association with this idea in the cult of vegetarianism. Vegetarians consider themselves much more spiritual than meat eaters.

Dr. Jung: Yes, like those people who think they are more spiritual when they don’t drink wine. But the contrary is true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 251

184 What the plant does is called breathing, but the breath of an animal actually causes the air to move, and that is specifically an animal characteristic.

For instance, one feels the impact of the wind, yet one does not see the wind; so it becomes a simile for things that cannot be seen although their effects are obvious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 253

185 While if you leap into the flames, you are entangled in the world of desirousness.

But inside you are in the cloister, a garden, with animals and flowers, inside is peace.

So that circle of blood or of fire is a sort of protection inasmuch as you do not identify with it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 254

186 One is subordinate to one’s individual genius or daemon, according to the ideas of antiquity, yet it is as if dwelling in oneself; it was even supposed to die with the individual. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 256

187 Everyone speaks of my unconscious, even of my collective unconscious, which is perfect nonsense; one might as well say my stars, my planets, my continents. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 257

188 Now, it is a fact that mankind has since time immemorial considered that the process of individuation, the production of the magic circle with that center, is man’s greatest value, the most desirable good. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 257

The aim of all Eastern philosophy is the production of that pool of gold, that center within the magic circle.

It is considered the highest attainment, for instance, in Tantric yoga, in Lamaistic philosophy, and in Chinese philosophy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 257-258

189 People who are a bit pathological produce disturbed mandalas instead of normal ones. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 258

190 That is one of the reasons for the primitive ghost theory: they explain every possible disturbance of body or mind as possession by evil spirits, which simply describes the fact that autonomous contents of the collective unconscious come in and take possession of a part of the self. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 258

191 As the lotus rises from the dark depths in the slime below and comes to the surface of the water, so the sun rises.

Because the lotus is an image of the rising sun, it has become the most current symbol in the East for the birth vessel of the god.

And if you look down upon the lotus, you see the mandala. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 261

192 I have evidence for that in the fact that later on, when she began to draw mandalas, she produced several irregular ones; one was like an inflammation, as if the mandala had been half eaten by fire, which shows that her perception of a mandala was very troubled. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 261

193 Well, the union of opposites in the unconscious means a state of peace, but it is a peace which cannot be realized because there is no consciousness.

So it does not really exist, it is existent nonexistence; no one has the benefit of it because no one perceives. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 262

194 I showed you a mandala that represented the primordial chaos.

That was a medieval mandala from a book which contains the secret psychology of the Cinquecento. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 262

195 For we may assume that the collective unconscious is in absolute peace until the individual appears.

196 Prof Demos: The mandala goes against the principle of life with the idea of stopping this turmoil.

Dr. Jung: Absolutely, that is perfectly true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 263

197 The individual is the manifestation of the trouble, and an individual consciousness appears from nowhere.

You don’t know where that thing came from, you just find it.

You can call it the individual and assume that the individual is the instigator of all that trouble. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 264

198 I would speak of the principle of individuation, which was obviously in the world long before the appearance of any kind of organic life.

For instance, I would say a stone or the plant was an individuation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 264

199 The point is that one draws in the forces from outside, depotentiates the factors of external life, and for

that one must have gates for things to enter by.

These gates are identical with the four functions and they are always characterized by four different colors, the particular colors usually representing particular functions.

This is not my explanation, it is in the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

So the four functions are really the four gates through which libido may come in or go out. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 264

200 The Eastern idea is to be in harmony with the functions, to be central, to disidentify with the functions and feel apart from them. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 266

201 The snake might be a symbol for the psychical tail of man reaching down into history. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 271

202 The reason why primitives are so hellishly afraid of anything new is because it contains unknown powers, indefinite dangers. Of course we think we like new ideas but it is not true.

Everybody is afraid, nobody likes new ideas; they always throw people into a panic, and where there is panic, there is bloodshed. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 272

203 Zarathustra is a great psychological tragedy, and in a way it is the tragedy of modern man.

Of course, it has never been understood as such, because the people who read it have not the symbolical knowledge necessary to understand it, but with analytical psychology one can really get at it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 274

204 In the Orphic cult there was a snake crawling on the table amongst the little loaves of bread, but I don’t know whether they ate it. ~Toni Wolff, Seminar, Page 275

205 The early Christian, or probably pre-Christian, Gnostics, celebrated the communion in the presence of a snake who was supposed to be the Savior; the snake was amongst the sacred bread that was eaten, as a sort of Host.

Then I have spoken of that interesting sect who believed that the Savior was the serpent on the tree in Paradise, where it gave good advice to our first parents, advice which made them conscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 275

206 But there are other stories from antiquity about the serpent which come closer to this symbol; for instance, one of the early Fathers tells of the mysteries of Sabazios, an Orphic cult, where they put a golden snake down through their clothes and pulled it out from under the garment below. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 275

207 And a similar cult was celebrated in Eleusis; there the initiate had to kiss a huge snake.

Kissing means a very close and intimate acquaintance, and it means also a certain assimilation, either the assimilation of the snake to the human being, or perhaps the assimilation of the human being to the snake, since the snake was supposed to be a heroic soul. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 275

208 Many of the old Greek heroes were supposed to have snakes’ souls.

The soul of the hero appeared after death in the form of a snake that dwelt near his tomb.

Therefore the famous serpent of Erechtheus, and the snake of Cecrops on the Acropolis at Athens. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

209 So eating the snake in dreams, as well as in fantasies and visions and ceremonials, means assimilation.

It is the same idea as eating the body of the Lord in the communion, in order to participate in its strength. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

210 That was also the original meaning of cannibalism, which was by no means instinctive; it was a magic ritual, and that is still the case wherever it prevails.

Those who eat human flesh and drink human blood acquire additional human strength. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

211 So the serpent usually symbolizes the darkness of the human soul that is connected with the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

212 The life of the earth is our past, and psychologically the snake means our connection with the past; it is a long historical tail that links us with that past existence, with the primeval forests and caves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

213 Also, it has a particular connection with the vegetative nervous system, because snakes are cold-blooded animals and have chiefly a vertebrate consciousness, one could say; that is, their main accumulation of nervous substance is in the spinal column, it is not in the brain. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

214 The snake is called the soul of the abdomen.

In the Kundalini yoga, which is a branch of the Tantric system, the Kundalini serpent is supposed to be coiled up in the lower basin. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 276

215 And in the temples of the Cabiri, they were kept in the adyton, a place where nobody was allowed to enter, like the most secret place in the Jewish temple at Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 278

216 Prof Demos: What is the new form which religion will take?

Dr. Jung: I don’t know, but it is quite possible that it will regress pretty far.

We have that one interesting piece of evidence from Russia, where the destruction of their religion forced the people to regress to paganism.

And in Germany those National Socialists, those swastika people, are building Wotan’s fires again. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 288

217 It is true that during thirty years now, I have had hundreds of patients, of whom the minority were Jews and the majority were Protestants, and I have not had more than four or five real Catholics among the whole lot. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 289

218 And it still happens that in the night of the new moon, farmers draw their sick babies through the hole in order to cure them.

That is a rite of rebirth which is used as a cure, as sick people were given new names for that purpose. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 290

219 That black snake is the earth factor in man, and we might assume that it is seeking rebirth, or perhaps it penetrates the body as a sort of phallic demon in order to impregnate it, or to transform it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 291

220 For instance, the worship of the ram in the Egyptian city of Mendes meant prostitution with the animal.

And the high priestesses of the Apis cults were buried in cohabitation with the bull-god; the phallus of a bull was put into the genitals of the dead high priestess, and there they were found-meaning that she was buried in an eternal embrace with the god, a very beautiful idea but of course represented in a terribly naïve way. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 292

221 You may have come across the Chinese expression “the lead of the water region” in The Golden Flower.

The water region in Chinese or in the Indian yoga philosophy is generally the lower part of the abdomen, or the bladder; lead is the heaviest substance and not of a noble nature, it has a very chthonic, passive quality, the inertia of the earth; it is really death in inorganic matter.

The snake symbolizes the peculiar life of that matter, the life in the inertia of the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 293

222 Yes, it is the phoenix miracle.

It is the utter destruction of the specific life of the snake and what is left is just the inorganic matter of the body.

Like the phoenix when he had burned up his nest with himself in it; the end is a heap of ashes, with apparently no life left whatever. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 293

223 The disk of gold already suggests a mandala but inasmuch as it is chthonic, still lying on the ground, it is apparently insufficient; the serpent evidently wants to go further, it is crawling up higher and higher on the tree of life.

What is it reaching for?

Answer: Immortality.

Dr. Jung: No, something far more human. Consciousness.

For it is at the same time the thing which happens in ourselves, a thing that is almost physiological.

Therefore Hindu philosophy holds that there is such a snake in the human body that creeps up the spinal cord and seeks to attain the light of wisdom, or consciousness.

That it wants to be recognized in the light, in consciousness, would be the psychological interpretation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 296

224 We can never decide whether God is or not, but we make a mistake when we say “merely a psychological phenomenon.”

Do you know what that is?

To say a thing is merely psychological is extremely modest, for a miserable little thought might be greater than the greatest power on earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 297

225 I say the greatest truth we know is the paradox that truth both is and is not; the ultimate truth must needs be an antinomy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 298

226 I would say that the only way in which we are able to perceive anything that has anything whatever to do with religious experience must be in the soul. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 299

227 You see, my purpose in psychology is not to elaborate a certain psychological system, or what one might

call a science, it is only a sort of method to free the way for individual experience, for that fact which to each individual will be decisive. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 301

228 Our eye or our ear synthesizes the psychical Factor with the phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 302

229 Therefore, the extravert would rather explain from without-by the milieu, heredity, etc.-while the introvert makes a tremendous fuss over the freedom of the will, because his point of view seems to derive from the fact that, according to the Eastern meaning, the whole world starts from within, from an energic point which they call the Shiva bindu, the point of unextended intensity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 306

230 But the Hindu mind thinks of it in an absolutely different way.

To him the world is an ever-existing illusion, but always created from the central point of energy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 306

231 Now I will read you something which gives one an idea; here is your great American mind, Emerson:

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.

It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 306

232 Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone.

Our life is an apprentice ship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Now we conclude from that that the creative eye, which is in everybody, is the same everywhere, because that creative point of Shiva Bindu is the world itself reduced to a nonspatial intensity-that is the way the Eastern mind looks at the enigma of the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 307

233 Miss Wolff In Catholic churches one often sees the Trinity with the eye of God in the center.

Dr. Jung: Yes, you see that in every Catholic church practically.

It is the eye of Horus again. It is the creative eye that sees everything and creates everything. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 307

234 So when the number seven occurs in a dream, it refers to the quality seven, which simply means mana, just as the number four, or three, or any other of the primary numbers are supposed to contain mana. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 310

235 Now the highest center in the Tantric yoga system is between the eyes, the so-called ajna center, the center of knowledge or of knowing, and that is represented by a circle, a mandala, with two wings. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 310

236 You see rain in popular superstition is used as a charm, it is magic, and that is not to be rationalized; it is an entirely psychological effect. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 312

237 It seems as if one-half of the world had been made by an engineer and the other half by a foolish poet. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 313

238 It is mana emanating from the head, and therefore you often see sunlike structures upon the head.

And what people cannot do with hair they try with hats-by way of expressing something with the head.

Naturally one always tries to make up for whatever is lacking.

One can almost tell the condition of their mind from the kind of hats women wear. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 313

239 That is a reference to the famous old institution where prostitution in the temple was thought to be highly creditable; the women were called hierodules, the servants of the god or of the sanctuary.

In Babylon, it was the prerogative of the women of the nobility to sleep on the roof of a temple in turn, being ladies-in-waiting of the god, so to speak.

Every night another woman was ready on the roof of the temple in case the god should descend and want her. That was such an offering of the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 315

240 As the Bishop of York recently said: “Sex is not only wholesome, it is holy.”

But that the Bishop of York said such a thing means that it is a modern point of view, with nothing holy about it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 316

241 You see, it is a chthonic animus-behind the conscious attitude is a club of old beasts to whom she is simply delivered over as if she were the worst street prostitute.

There is something like that in the animus, he really can prostitute a woman. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 316

242 Too many women have lost their instincts altogether and only live for what is useful and applicable. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 317

243 For if you have no form, nothing has form, nobody has form; if you are not definite, nothing is definite; if you are chaotic, everything is chaotic; if you have no meaning, nothing has meaning.

Your world depends upon yourself; even the meaning of the world depends upon yourself having a meaning.

Being individuated, having form, is indispensable.

Also it is indispensable that objects have a form, and that simply would not appear to you if you had no form. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 319

244 People have a transference to their analyst because they suppose that he is in possession of the treasure.

It is like rubbing up against the shrine containing the bones of the saint; they get the grace, as if he were the

savings bank of divine treasures.

~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 319

245 You cannot dissolve a transference by analyzing it away, that is quite impossible.

You only get over a transference if you get the projected value out of the object. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 319

246 And when a man projects his anima into a woman, he has to accept it; even if he knows it is the anima, it is a projection.

Only through personal contact do people become able to extract the value which is behind the projection; only in that way can they integrate whatever is their own in the projection. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 320

247 For the unconscious always produces an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 321

248 This man is of legendary age, I don’t know how many centuries old; he is the personification of the collective unconscious which is of immense age, and in his eyes she sees with the vision of the collective unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 321

249 Now why are those men standing on the bank? Why are they not all in that chaotic river?

Mrs. Schlegel: Perhaps they are conscious.

Remark: They are individuated.

Dr. Jung: Yes, these are the people of detached consciousness, people who are conscious of themselves and of life.

And that they call to the struggling masses in the rushing water produces the effect that a few souls are cast upon the bank-they wake up and leave the great river. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 321

250 Then the men who stand there lift them up and show them a star and a sun.

What does that mean?

Remark: Consciousness and individual fate.

Dr. Jung: Exactly.

The star is the individual fate, and the sun means the light of day, and it is also the symbol of the deity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 322

251 And so in our world only a few are standing upon the bank and really understand, see with their eyes what is happening; all the others are just toiling on as blind as ever.

The unconscious emphasizes here the extraordinary importance of consciousness, consciousness as a sort of redemption from the eternal wheel of death and rebirth.

Like the wheel in Buddhistic philosophy, death and rebirth, the curse of that eternal illusory meaningless

existence.

In this vision we find the same principle as in Buddhism, the consciousness of what is happening as a redeeming principle. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 322

252 Consciousness redeems one from the curse of that eternal flowing on in the river of unconsciousness.

This is an exceedingly important idea and is the next parallel to the central Buddhist teaching. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 323

253 Moreover, most of the matter in space devours itself without producing anything but radiation; it just goes on in an eternal aimless radiation, and only a very little matter forms ashes. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 323

254 The goal of the universe would seem to be that all the splendid feu d ‘artifice which one sees in the heavens is merely transforming matter that ends in a silly kind of eternal radiation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 323

255 If you don’t accept your whole life in all its chaotic entanglements you don’t live it, so how can you become conscious of it?

You cannot detach from the entanglement of life if you are not in it; only through an intimate knowledge of it can you detach from it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 324

256 You know in the centuries just preceding and immediately after the birth of Christ, the two main religions in the Roman Empire were the cult of Mithras, a religion for men; and the cult of the Great Mother, the so-called Magna Mater, a religion for women; she was called the Dea Syria in Asia Minor, where the cult originated and whence it was introduced into Rome. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 327

257 We are very badly informed about the origin of the Mass, but some of the details were taken from the cult of Mithras-those little bells designating the particular moment of transformation, for instance.

And our Communion, which seems to be quite specifically Christian, was like the one celebrated in the cult of Mithras; they also had a Communion table, and the Host, little round loaves of bread marked with a cross. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 327

258 In about the thirteenth century the cult of Mary developed tremendously, and it was at that time that the famous Lorettanian Litany was invented, that invocation to the mother, where she is called the vas in signe devotionis, the excellent vessel of devotion, or the Jons signatus, the sealed fountain, or the hortus conclusus, the hidden garden, or the rosa mystica. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 328

259 The rosa mystica is a mandala, a magic circle, called in the East the yoni, a female symbol and a symbol of the mother.

It is difficult to tell how much of this has been taken directly from the cult of the Great Mother, but we know that the vas is analogous to the life-giving chalice in the legend of the Holy Grail, and this goes right back to two sources: to the Celtic source where the sacred vessel was a conspicuous symbol, and to the so-called Vase of Sin in the Gnostic cults. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 328

260 Of course the designation ”Vase of Sin” is entirely Christian nomenclature.

In Egypt the idea has often been repeated in the form of the jars on the water wheels by which water is brought up from the Nile; they are always represented with sort of ligamenta or ribbons on the sides.

Their origin is uncertain, but they can probably be explained as the ligamenta lata of the uterus, because this jar was a symbol of the uterus, the life-giving vase. It is very often found on Gnostic gems. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 328

261 You can be your own object.

There have always been external objects, but even if there had been nothing, man himself was there, and from the way in which he lived he acquired definite empirical contents, images, by which he grasped the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 331

262 The idea of magic causation is known there, because it plays a role in black magic, as when a person causes an illness or a death by magic means.

But the higher philosophical idea is synchronicity ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 334

263 At a certain depth of the unconscious mind, one cannot fail to meet that inherited treasure of wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 336

264 I have told you several stories of people with compartment psychology who live one thing in one compartment, another in another, never knowing it because they never confront these facts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 339

265 And if you get as far as that, if you reach out to your own truth, down to your own blood, to your own law, if you know how far you are real, you will then have your own experiences, and you will understand what things are.

Then you will see that everything real, everything alive, really grows out of the blood; they are not just there, self-evident. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 339

266 I have seen several cases where serious attempts at suicide have occurred, and just as they thought: now it is the end, they understood what life was, and they never tried it again.

Sometimes people have to injure themselves very badly in order to awaken to what life really is. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 339

267 I had another case many years ago, an hysterical girl who tried to burn herself with methylated spirits.

But when she was all in flames, she suddenly understood the terrific nonsense she was doing, and she never

tried it again, she became reasonable. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 340

268 Often it takes the death of the father or mother, who have guaranteed things for them, to bring the provisional life to an end; then it is borne in upon them that things depend upon themselves, and they begin to revise their former lives. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 340

269 Yes, and it [Wheat] is also the symbol for the one that resurrects, for Iacchus, the divine son of the earth that is born in the winnowing fan; and for Osiris out of whose sarcophagus wheat grew; and for Christ inasmuch as he is the Host, made of the flour of wheat.

St. Augustine called Mary the virgin earth which had not yet been fertilized by the rain, and so Christ is the son of the earth, the wheat. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 341

270 The best-known form of the transitus is Christ carrying the cross, the cross being the tree again; that symbol is in Christianity as well as in the cult of Attis, where the tree has the meaning of the mother. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 362

271 It is a fact that most spiritual cults lead to an alienation of feeling from the world.

In early Christianity thousands and thousands isolated themselves in the desert, whole cities were depopulated. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 353

272 You cannot create when you withdraw into thin air entirely, you need the world, because that is the raw material, the materia, and you have to get your hands dirty in order to do a serious job; so you must touch the world, you must get entangled in the materia. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 353

273 A spiritual existence is really a suspended condition.

You can be a hermit and live in the spirit, and it is a certain life, but it is not a visible creation.

On the other hand, though people say that is doing nothing, I am not quite convinced of it; I

am sure that those hermits in the Syrian and Libyan deserts did a mighty good thing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 354

274 But the withdrawal from the world is only useful in a time when the spirit must be demonstrated, or when the power of thought has to be developed in contradistinction to the mere operation of natural law.

Then when the times change, when the power of the spirit is amply demonstrated and mankind is convinced of its advantages, naturally the usefulness of that withdrawal from the world becomes obsolete. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 354

275 In our epoch there are many symptoms of the growing importance of the Yin. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 354

276 That tremendous giant lying on the ground symbolizes an enormous power associated with the earth.

Giants are always chthonic powers, like those in Nordic mythology, or the Titans in Greek mythology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 358

277 For instance, when Christ spoke of the treasure in the field, he meant the Kingdom of Heaven that is within us.

And this small light, a germ of life, a little plant, will grow into a powerful tree, it is the beginning of a new consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 358

278 The Eastern mind is absolutely aware of the fact that Yang is just as dangerous as Yin; it is our prejudice that we think that Yang is all good and Yin is all evil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 357

279 It is the hero, really, who is swallowed by the dragon yet always reappears, having destroyed the dragon from within.

That tiny thing, that unique individual, that Self, is small as the point of a needle, yet because it is so small it is also greater than great. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 358-359

280 What is the Sahara without the grains of sand?

What is the ocean without the drops of water?

Man acknowledges that God is indispensable to him; but man is just as indispensable to God.

They depend upon each other. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 359

281 Now when that spark of light, a new consciousness, enters the world, it naturally finds itself, as I said, up against the great powers of banality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 359

282 a better example would be the conquest of Rome by Asia Minor and Egypt.

And the same thing is happening to us: we conquered the East, and the East is now conquering us.

Here in the heart of European civilization we are talking Chinese philosophy and declaring ourselves unable to find anything better. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 362

283 GNOSTIC

284 You see, the egg is in a way a sort of cosmogonic system; the yellow substance in the form of a globe might be the earth, and the albumen in which the nucleus is suspended would be celestial space. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 364

285 for the egg is the eternal example of the perfect germ in a dormant potential condition.

It is often represented on antique Gnostic gems encircled by the snake. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 365

286 If mankind had not suffered from living in caves or in the branches of trees, they would never have invented houses.

So even if suffering is not inflicted from outside, it is inflicted by people upon themselves with the unconscious purpose of feeling themselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 368

287 The idea of Christian suffering, I mean intentional martyrdom, was to deny the egotistical interests of man and his avoidance of pain. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 369

288 Christian martyrdom meant the complete abnegation of the ego, which was absolutely necessary at that time.

It is impossible to live as an ego forever, it is too childish.

Of course, many people often make the great mistake of taking the ego for the Self.

The ego is nothing but the artificial self. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 369

289 If we don’t assert ourselves, if we don’t create a new head, the past will be an overwhelming body that crushes us.

But by putting a head on the body, we give sense and meaning to the whole thing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 371

290 The spiritual sun in Christianity is the specific truth of Christianity, it is the Logos, and it is symbolized as the circle with the cross, which in the East is called a mandala. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 372

291 That is the new light which shines in the darkness, as is said in the beginning of the Gospel of St. John.

In the centuries around the time of Christ, there was, as you know, an entirely different kind of psychology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 373

292 Then Christ meant the discovery of a new attitude, a new hypothesis about the meaning of life, and therefore he was called the new light; he was even compared with the sun, so much so that the early Christians saluted the rising sun as if it were Christ himself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 373

293 The idea that Christ was that new sun was encouraged by the church in order to assimilate the Mithraic cult, just as they usurped the birthday of Mithra (25 December) and made it into Christ’s birthday.

This is the origin of the sun symbolism in Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 373

294 The word pious really means obedient, so impia vita would mean the life that is not obedient or does not conform to the new light; but if he succeeds in fulfilling the new meaning, in living by the new Logos, then the light of day will shine upon him in eternity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 373

295 Look at our dances!

The N’goma dance in the African forest has exactly the rhythm of jazz, and the peculiar way of moving the body, though it is done much better by the primitive, is imitated by our ladies quite successfully.

296 But we must accept the statement of Isaiah and other prophets, that the savior always comes from the place where we least expect him, as being eternally true. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 377

297 But after the removal of many prejudices, this head, or mind, has a chance of developing, and it fills her with words of fire, like the tongues of fire in the miracle of Pentecost, when the disciples were permeated by the fire of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 376-377

298 When one gets a new insight, a new impulse in life, it is as if one were setting out for an unknown goal.

That is an archetypal situation which often occurs in human life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 380

299 You see, snakes are always the most unexpected and the most startling of animals, and they have the disagreeable quality of being so close to the ground that one is always in danger of stepping on them.

A very primitive instinct makes us utter an exclamation when we come across a snake in the grass-naturally it is startling. So, as I said, the snake is apt to be a sort of danger signal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 380

300 The apparition of a snake since the beginning of the world, has been at least very dubious.

And as a psychological symbol, it always portrays something deeply unconscious, because it is associated with the intestines and with everything obscure in our psychology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 380

301 The snake, particularly the green snake, very often means the path of life, as the river means the flow of life, or the path of fate; it has a source, it follows a potential, and it finally ends in the infinite sea. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 380

302 The river of life sounds very hopeful, very optimistic, but it is always a little uncertain; therefore most people try to remain upon the bank or even farther away if possible. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 381

303 Then the game would not be worth the candle, it would not be worthwhile to open the egg or to bother about such fantasies at all.

But we have to bother about them because they really contain those germs of life without which that particular life would remain mutilated or sterile; it only becomes living and real through the admixture. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 383

304 The animus assumes again the role of the leader of souls, the Hermes psychopompos.

He takes her by the hand, leaves the river, and enters a temple which is on the bank. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 383

305 The first part of the new development is that she has to trust herself to the natural course of events, to the potential, so she is led by the psychopompos or the animus in vias naturalis, following the natural flow of things. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 384

306 But one should not trust normality too far; when people are very normal it is often a compensation-they are concealing insanity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 386

307 If a person asks why the police have brought him to the asylum, and he is told it is because he is crazy, he goes up into the air and there is hell to pay; then he becomes definitely insane.

I have seen quite a number of cases where the very mention of their disease was enough to drive them mad. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 386

308 I could give you names of famous people with latent psychoses, and their chief topic of conversation is normal living.

Generally they are reformers. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 387

309 Naivete is a vice in ordinary life, but in psychology one cannot be naïve enough, because these things are based on the primitive mind. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 387

310 Baptism does not mean quenching fire, but bestowing fire.

Therefore it is said in the New Testament, not baptism by water but by fire. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 388

311 You are not redeemed by repentance, you remain the same old Adam, because by repentance you are not changed; you may get baptized, but that is not a real change.

It must be a complete change of the system, an acceptance of the things that were unacceptable before.

When you accept the fact of your inferiority, it lives with you; you are it too, but not exclusively. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 391

312 Christ helped the woman to accept herself as she was, and that is what the animus is doing here when he assumes the gesture of Christ.

Now we will see the effect of the cure. He says: “Arise and hold communion with the people.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 392

313 You see, people who have feelings of inferiority are not accepted because they do not accept themselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 392

314 To people who say: “Oh, I am very much interested in people, I love them, but I hate myself,”

I always reply: “Nobody can stand you because you bring with you the stench of your stables; go first and clean your stables, and then we will accept you as a clean human being; then we will like you if there is anything likable.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 392

315 Since you are alive, there is something good in you, there is the Self in you.

That is the greatest treasure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 392

316 Therefore Meister Eckhart says that one should not repent too much of one’s sins because it might keep one away from grace. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 394

317 if you want to catch the pearl-dew of the noble Godhead, you must cling imperturbably to his mankind. ~ Angelus Silesius, Visions Seminar, Page 394

318 The head is, of course, only a part of the body.

It means consciousness or vision or idea, but it does not include all the other functions; nor does it include the unconscious without which there is no full realization of a thought. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 395

319 Usually my patients have no knowledge of painting or drawing, but when a picture suggests itself that expresses a particularly comprehensive idea, all the faculties of the individual are called forth, and it is as if the body itself were supporting them in their endeavor. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 395

320 One doesn’t see a god when the flowers spring up, but that is what one’s psyche makes of it.

It is a kind of reverberation in one’s psyche, a psychological phenomenon which originally coincided with the processes of nature-that is, so long as man was like animals, in complete participation mystique with nature. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 397

321 There is the south wind which comes over the mountains, the Fohn, as we call it here, during which the electricity in the air really accounts for certain psychological and nervous phenomena. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 398

322 The voices the insane hear have an absolutely personal character, though they are obviously part of their own psychology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 399

323 There are texts which speak of the King’s or the Pharaoh’s Osiris, meaning his immortal substance, the thing he had in common with the god who died like man and overcame death by resurrection. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 400

324 One could say: Live your life to the full and then you can die.

This idea was expressed by Cicero, the idea that the fullness of life brings about the fullness of time and the moment which is ripe for death. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 402

325 “The fowls of the air and the beasts that are upon the earth or under the earth, and the fishes in the sea, these are they that will draw you into the Kingdom.”

That means the instincts, one could almost say the blind instincts; the way of nature will bring you quite naturally wherever you have to go. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 401-402

326 Who created the religions of the world?

Who produced Christ? Who produced the Buddha?

All that is the natural growth of man.

If left to himself, he can bring about his own salvation quite naturally; he has always produced symbols that redeemed him. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 403

327 Nature is not especially interested in man, not in such a way that we feel it; yet since nature is also in man, we must admit that she is interested in his existence, otherwise she would not have produced him. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 404

328 The lowest region is muladhara, which is down in the perineum.

That is the root center where the whole system starts, where everything takes its origin.

The next region above is physiological, that is the water region, the region of the bladder; we cannot call it psychical because we have no evidence that psychical values were at any time attached to it.

~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 407

329 The spleen has also been regarded as a place in which the soul lived, and in old English that word designated a mood; it was thought that when the spleen went wrong, one was affected by particular moods, just as the liver, which is also an abdominal organ, is supposed to be connected with the emotions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 407

330 You see, when man developed out of that lowest center, muladhara, he got into the pre-psychological region, the condition which is characterized by the psychology of the emotions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 408

331 A germ of higher consciousness contained originally in the fire below can become air-like and rise to the head, or perhaps to a great height above the head.

That is the idea which gave rise to the Tantric system and to the alchemist system of philosophy in the Middle Ages. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 409

332 The poets of the Court of Frederick II in Salerno and those in Dante’s group complained that the medieval church withheld the sweet secret of the rose.

An interesting article was published in the Europaische Revue by Luigi Valli, a modern commentator on Dante, about the secret language used by the poets of Dante’s time in order to designate the mystical rose. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 412

333 The rose means love. And this red is the color of passion.

It is not a light red, it is a strong red, a burning color.

It is also the color of the muladhara region, the lowest center according to the Kundalini yoga. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 413

334 It is quite possible that John, being the teacher or initiator of Jesus, was convinced that such truths would be incomprehensible to the crowd and therefore should be withheld.

But Jesus thought that it would be cruel to withhold such a light from humanity, so he identified himself

with the Messiah and went out into the world to teach people the truth.

And we know the results, how it has worked.

As a matter of fact it was not understood-even the disciples misunderstood it.

~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 413

335 But in the Manda-which means gnosis or knowledge-there is no personal savior; the savior there is called by a name which is of particular interest for us: Manda d ‘haje, meaning understanding of life; that is an impersonal figure, a sort of Poimen, representing the wisdom or the consciousness of life, an exceedingly modern conception. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 413-414

336 And very conscious people are particularly inclined to identify themselves with their consciousness, losing sight of what they are unconsciously.

That is the handicap of any strong consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 414

337 The persona is a sort of mental system which consists partially of oneself and partially of what one is forced to be by one’s surroundings.

One would not have a persona if one were alone; usually people who are quite alone lose it altogether. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 414

338 Therefore I say the persona is both consciously and unconsciously a product of the surroundings; it is a sort of compromise between the incomparable and incomprehensible ego, and the milieu, the surrounding conditions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 416

339 Of course we all cling to something.

We live through our eyes, we live in the field of consciousness; in other words, one half is living outside of ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 416

340 And also before the invisible world, for it is in the mysteries that these things happen; there is no actual audience, but before the invisible onlooker she should be naked.

You see, she is never alone in these visions, she is accompanied by animals, or the animus, or several animus figures; and before these observers nothing should remain concealed. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 417

341 For instance, a person tells me that in the year so-and-so he made a fatal mistake.

But there is no such thing, that is fate; fate is greater than we are, it was just what had to occur at that moment, and it was no mistake looked at from his inner structure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 417

342 Your conscious processes as well as your unconscious-that is, the power from the back, of your instincts-are always pushing you out with a centrifugal momentum against which you must have some protection.

The only protection is the knowledge or consciousness of your individual limitations, what you are without a veil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 418

343 As long as things are in a quiescent condition the serpent does not get the fire that is dormant in the creative point of Shiva; but when it receives the living spark from the god that is hidden in the creative center, in that moment the snake leaps up and mounts through the different centers of the abdomen, as well as the thorax. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 419

344 People sometimes assume that there really are such centers, but the Hindu himself

says ‘Just as if” there were such centers; it is not to be taken literally. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420

345 People in whom the Kundalini serpent has reached the heart region will most probably suffer from neurotic symptoms in the heart; and as long as the Kundalini is unconscious they suffer from abdominal difficulties.

As I told you, there is hardly any case of hysteria that is not accompanied by abdominal trouble; also peculiar sex excitements. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420

346 When the Kundalini starts there is sex trouble, and the next thing would be bladder trouble, like forced urination.

Then comes the stomach, and then the heart, and then the higher psychological regions.

To repeat: first the perineum, at the base of the small basin; then the region of the bladder at the entrance of the basin; then the solar plexus; then the region just above, the diaphragm; then the larynx; and then the forehead.

There is something beyond, but these are the practical examples. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420

347 In the beginning of life, in early childhood, one sees what an individual really is; children who are already introspective at an early age have an intuition about themselves which perhaps never leaves them.

They know exactly what they are.

Later on they usually lose this knowledge; it is partially squeezed out of them, and partially they succumb to certain illusions, and it is only much later that they discover it again. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420

348 Of course in a way nothing ever happens to you which you are not. The life you live is your life.

All your experiences are yourself-that is exactly what you are. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 420

349 Therefore it is probable that few yogis reach the stage when the snake enters the ajna center of consciousness.

That should not be mixed up with our ordinary consciousness, which has nothing to do with this particular kind of experience.

One can be quite conscious, yet one has not the consciousness which is brought about by the serpent. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 421

350 You see, the experience of the awakening of the serpent is not merely a sex experience; there are millions of sex experiences, and there is not one real yoga experience among them.

That is something apart, it is a particular kind of sex experience. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 421

351 Should one reach the lowest place, muladhara, for instance, one might be caught in the roots.

Such experiences are so real that people who have not the faintest knowledge of Eastern philosophy have painted pictures of a human figure caught in the roots of a tree; there is one in The Secret of the Golden Flower, a recumbent female figure dormant in the roots, in muladhara. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 422

352 “Many are called but few are chosen”; that is an esoteric truth.

It is true that the neurotic can only be really cured by supernormal psychology, additional psychology; if that cannot be accomplished they are just maimed.

They are either crippled, or they are supernormal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 423

353 You see children of a certain age, if they have any introspection at all, have far more knowledge of these things than adult people, who are getting blind.

Young children have a consciousness which is remarkable. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424

354 Children have the vision still hanging over them of things which they have never seen, and could not possibly have seen, and which are in accordance with the theory of reincarnation.

It is just as if reminiscences of a former life were carried over into this life, or from the ancestral life

perhaps, we don’t know. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424

355 I could tell you children’s dreams which are simply uncanny, and if you want to interpret them at all, you have to use uncanny means.

They cannot be explained even by the psychology of the parents.

They must come from the psychology of the collective unconscious; one could say they were remnants of things they had seen before they were born, and that is really vision. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424

356 I know a case where a vision affected a whole life.

Individuals can be stunted all through their lives by a vision in childhood.

Such children are not quite born-their birth takes place much later, when they can detach. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 424

357 But many people are never quite born; they live in the flesh but a part of them is still in what Lamaistic philosophy would call the Bardo, in the life between death and birth, and that prenatal state is filled with extraordinary visions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 425

358 Oh, yes. Initiation rituals do purposely drive people mad in order that they may have that extraordinary experience and be liberated from it at the same time, which, of course, is the very best protection. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 425-426

359 Before we leave, I want to call your attention to a new book by Charles Aldrich, The Primitive Mind and Modern Civilization.

It is an excellent exposition of primitive psychology.

He has done some work with me here and has a psychological point of view, so he presents his subject in a

way which is useful to us. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 427

360 In the cult of Dionysus the blood is the wine; in the Christian cult the wine is the blood.

The blood in the cult of Dionysus is really the blood, the juice of the earth, the blood of the Great Mother, and then it becomes the wine, and the wine in itself is the concrete sacred object. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 432

361 Yes, the Christian idea abstracts or spiritualizes substance into spirit; the wine, meaning the blood, is something abstract because that blood is not real, in spite of the dogma of transubstantiation, which still exists in the Lutheran as well as in the Catholic church. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 432

362 It is an assertion of spiritual reality over and above the concrete reality, which one finds also in many primitive cults: in the totemic cults, for instance, where they eat the totem animal once every year.

It is eaten at the totemic meal, and it is one and the same animal or bird that is eaten in every village of the tribe. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 432

363 Americans hardly ever notice that wine has individuality; it is just hock, or claret, or champagne, and nothing more, which is an exceedingly barbarous assumption. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 434-435

364 Wine has soul, wine is something living, and it is spiritual. To her that was a great discovery, and the spiritual effect that good wine could have was a discovery too.

I am not trying to persuade you to become alcoholics, but there really is something special about wine. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 435

365 One finds it in those famous fragments of papyrus dating from the first century A.D., which were excavated at Oxyrhynchus in about 1904.

In a talk between Christ and the disciples, they ask him first how they shall get to the Kingdom of Heaven, and he explains in that wonderful passage about the animals leading them there.

Then he says: “Therefore strive ye to know yourselves and ye shall be aware that ye are the sons of the Father; and ye shall know that ye are in the city of God, and ye are the city.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 444

366 Why have we neuroses? The ego consciousness is too narrow. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 445

367 Is this not an exact parallel to the Indian conception of Atman-Brahman, being the spark of Life eternal within man, to find which in oneself is the most individual experience and at the same time the most collective one, as Brahman is Life in all creation and beyond creation?” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447

368 The legend of the youth of Krishna, who was contemporary with Christ, is such a close parallel that Christians say it originated in Christian countries or was affected by Christian influences, while the Hindus assert just the opposite. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447

369 This idea of the city of Brahman-which means Brahma himself, of course-is very much older than Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447

370 No scholar in our days will deny the Persian influence on the conceptions of early Christianity; the Christian idea of heaven and hell, for instance, is typically Persian.

The influence of Hindu philosophy is still questionable, however, though it is a fact that there were Buddhist monasteries in Persia about two hundred years before the birth of Christ. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 447

371 Nothing has ever been projected, that is a wrong conception really, the term projection is wrong; it has always been outside, it was never inside.

A so-called projection is simply a thing which is discovered to be outside, and it then becomes integrated by the discoverer with himself.

Our psychology was all found outside, it was never in our pockets. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 450

372 Whereas my book or my pipe, particularly my pipe, is teeming with life, it is sacred, nobody may touch it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 451

373 It is the law of enantiodromia, the law of Heraclitus, that when things have reached their culmination they transform into their own opposite.

That is the teaching of the I Ching. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 457-458

374 How could you ever understand yourself without realizing the animal that is within you? But you avoid the knowledge of yourself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 458

375 There is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of things. Dionysus is concerned with the outside of things, with tangible forms, with everything that is made of earth, but inside is the spirit, which is the soul of objects.

Whether that is our own psyche or the psyche of the universe we don’t know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 458

376 We assume that we will be in a blissful state when redeemed; if not here, then at least after death.

But in reality it is not so simple as that. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 460

378 It shows the very interesting female nature, also a bit of the hidden story of the Holy Ghost.

Her name was Sophia originally, and according to Gnostic teaching Sophia was the last form of a rather scandalous series of women.

It has always been terribly shocking, but we must mention it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 476

379 Sophia was the Gnostic idea of wisdom, a sort of abstract concept, yet it was very much personified.

You find her in the Bible.

She is described in that last chapter of Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, it is almost a personal figure, most tangible. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 477

380 It is the highest form of the anima, one could say-the spiritual woman, or the universal mother-but originating in the beginning of things as Chawwa, or Eve, the primordial earthly mother. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 477

381 Simon Magus is a tremendous figure who appears even in modern theology; the famous Tubingen school suggests that he was no other than St. Paul.

That is doubtful, yet it is discussed as a real possibility. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 478

382 According to legend Simon Magus was a great sorcerer, he was called the arch-heretic, and he was supposed to be the father of the Gnosis. As a matter of fact he was not; he was apparently a contemporary of the Apostles, and the Gnosis existed before that time; Gnostic monasteries were described by Philo the Jew in 20 A.D. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 478

383 Helen, then, was an adulterous woman, and if you look at it with unprejudiced eyes, Mary was an adulterous woman too; she had an illegitimate relation with the Holy Ghost, and Christ would be the illegitimate child.

This story is found in old Jewish traditions about the origin of Jesus, in the Toldoth Jeshu, a book which was burned by the church a number of times in the Middle Ages because it was considered to be most blasphemous. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 479

384 The syncretistic cults of that era were based very largely upon astrological facts.

On the Mithraic altar-stones, for instance, are the sun and the moon and the signs of the zodiac, and it is evident that they are meant as astrological symbols.

In the Christian cult it was more hidden, but the philosophical systems of that time were filled with astrological connotations. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 486

385 The bull in astrology is an earthly sign, it is the domicilium Veneris.

The cult of Attis belongs to that great group of mother cults, Attis is very much the son of the Great Mother; so the bull is very much connected with the cult of the Magna Mater. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 486

386 First I will repeat the Gnostic classification of the anima.

It begins, as you remember, with Chawwa, the earth-the earth not being meant, of course, as the terrestrial globe; it is also called Eve, and it is the furrow in the field that is to be fertilized.

It really has the meaning of the female genitals, it is the yoni, so this lowest stage could be called the yoni stage.

The next is Helen of Troy. The third stage is Mary, the Mother of God. And the fourth is Sophia. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 489-490

387 There is a famous book, one of the very few Gnostic books that has been saved in its entirety, called Pistis Sophia, the Gnosis of the Light. Pistis means faith. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 490

388 Now Hermes is at the same time a phallic god; it was a phallic worship to begin with.

His name plays a great role in the history of Greek art; for instance, you all know that Greek style of bust, the head of a man upon a long pedestal tapering at the lower end.

It is called a herm because such phallic columns were the original statues of Hermes. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 490

389 A man’s anima must fit the woman somewhere, or such a figure would never have originated, and a man could never conform to a woman, nor a woman to a man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 491

390 Then is there any more beautiful love story than the love story of Mary?

Wonderfully secret, divine, it is the only love affair of God that we know about.

He is the illegitimate divine lover who produces the Redeemer. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 492

391 The worship of the bull is always an earthly cult, and I said last time that astrologically the bull is an earthly sign; Taurus is the house in which Venus dwells. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 492

392 You know missionaries in primitive countries admonish the natives to wear clothes.

The European women knit woolen socks and pants and jumpers for those little Negroes, because they are so terribly naked, and the fools here send money over for that purpose.

Those perfectly natural beautiful beings who are so much more decent than we are, going about naked like animals or beautiful flowers, are taught by our Christianity to wear clothes; it is abominable, apart from the bad taste. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 493

393 Naturally, then, we are not inclined to give great importance to the sacred things of the earth, and therefore that Gnostic scale is to us a scale of values-the vicious thing at the bottom and the divine thing at the top.

But that is a mistake.

The beginning is divine and the end is divine, and between the two is the human being, the more earthly and the more heavenly being. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 494

394 Yes, we said last time that the lion was a Mithraic symbol and it is often the counterpart of the snake; the lion would be the Yang principle, the fiery, male principle in contrast to the humid, shadowy, earthly principle of the serpent. ~ Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 494

395 The enormous machines in factories, the enormous steamers and trains and automobiles, all that has become so overwhelming that man is the mere victim of it.

Look at the city of New York. Nobody can tell me that man feels like a king in New York. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 502

397 A big city is like a holocaust of humanity, as Zola expressed it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 502

398 So the relation between that Hermes, called the thrice-greatest Hermes, and the Greek god Hermes is very remote; they are not identical. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 505

399 The medicine man in primitive tribes is the first form of the leader of souls, and then later on the healer, or the priest, or the analyst.

In modern times every analyst is in the very disagreeable situation of being a psychopompos, or being understood as such even if he is not at all what he seems to be; it is an effect of the transference of that archetypal figure. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 506

400 It is a fact that the medicine men are often very spiteful and apt to resort to poisons. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 507

401 When things are left to themselves we always revert to type, to the archetypal form of life.

So we instinctively revert, in any dark and uncanny matter, to the medicine man; our first reaction is to the man who is initiated into the secret knowledge, the man who has access to the dark sides of human nature, to the unconscious.

Therefore the making of the primitive medicine man is a strange procedure, which is designed to open up the unconscious.

They are almost driven crazy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 507

402 It is as if one were free to say: I don’t want this communion with the earth, it is too barbarous and primitive, therefore I lift myself out of it. That is will to power. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 508

403 So whether one lives the life of the body, or whether one suppresses the principle of the body and becomes a spirit, has been evolved along the line of instinctive force.

At first we were those laws of human nature, and only afterwards did man give a name to them; only very much later did they evolve into moral or philosophical principles; first they were the forces themselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 508

404 So the instincts themselves produce repression, it is not an invention of man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 508

405 People living in towns never see a snake but they all dream of them, and particularly those who live in a straight line have dreams and fears about snakes.

So the snake is the symbol of the great wisdom of nature, for it is not the direct way, but the crooked way, the detour, that is the shortest way. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 510

406 The sphinx is a religious object, it is partially a temple, which shows that it is not only a sort of chthonic dragon or a devouring monster, it is also a spiritual fact. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 511

407 But the plant is identical with the basic laws of nature because it is entirely rooted in the earth; it is a helpless victim or absolutely at one with nature.

An animal has the faculty of moving away and seeking its own place, it is literally less attached to the laws of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 513

408 Yes, so the tree is really the soul of the sphinx, and it is that thing which solves the riddle of the sphinx.

It is the union of opposites which is interrupted in a way in animal and human life, but which is expressed by the symbol of the tree. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 513

409 The way of yoga is compared to plant life, because it is not always running towards a certain goal, devouring whatever seems good; it is a very silent growth and in absolute submission to the laws of the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 513

410 So the tree of the Kundalini is the particular yoga that deals with the assimilation of the Kundalini serpent, and the ultimate reunion of the god with the Shakti that in the intervening space were separated into creator and created, into the creative god and the phantasmal illusionary world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 514

411 But in dealing with the figures of the unconscious-those phantasmal veils-you must play the role, no matter how inflated.

If you are inflated to the size of a god, well, step into your unconscious as a god and you are a god.

But you can only know god on that level, and to Mrs. Smith you are no god. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 515

412 If one literally could go from the brain down through the spinal cord and follow the fibers which lead from the spinal cord, one would come to the ganglia of a nervous system which is much older than the spinal nervous system. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 516

413 In primitive legends the old mother in the West is often a sort of cannibal, and primitive man eats the flesh of the dead.

He celebrates cannibal feasts as a sort of sympathetic magic, he does what the earth does in order to increase fertility.

That is still practiced in our days.

Just recently there was a case in north Kenya.

They ate a grandmother who was particularly beloved.

You see, they had a grandmother in the family whom they worshipped, so they gave her very good food, they fed her well till she grew quite fat, and when she died the family ate her.

Then all the fools were disgusted and horrified at such a terrible thing, but they ate her in the end out of sheer love in order to give her continuation of life.

It was a supreme act of devotion; they continued her life by embodying her body in theirs, really a very touching idea.

One should not disturb people in such acts of devotion, it is very foolish, it destroys their morality completely. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 517

414 Man wishes that were not true, and therefore he always tries to make something intellectual and masculine of the spirit.

But the spirit in its original form is always female, it comes from the Great Mother. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 518

415 Generally a mirror symbolizes the mind or the intellect. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 524

416 It is also the Eastern idea that through understanding one finds the roots of suffering which lie in the fire of desirousness, and if they are denied or uprooted, the world, inasmuch as the individual makes the world, comes to a standstill; if the individual comes to a standstill and recedes into nirvana, the world represented by that individual is at an end. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 524

417 And Jakob Boehme, that famous mystic and philosopher of the sixteenth century, said that the basis of the world is the nil, the Nichts, the non-being, and that it cannot be otherwise because the beginning is desire, longing, and only an absolute vacuum can have longing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 525

418 Anything that is beyond the human is animal and divine, and neither animal nor divine: therefore the animal symbols for the divine, the Holy Ghost as a dove, for instance; all the antique gods have their animal counterparts. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 525

419 So that natural mind is not a function of man; it is a part of nature, the mind of trees or rocks or water or the clouds or the winds, and so ruthless, so absolutely beyond man that it hardly takes him into account. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 525

420 The natural mind is very apparent in prophetic women.

Tacitus says of the old Germanic women that they were reverenced for their wisdom and their gift of prophecy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 525

421 Walburga is a typical German name, and the Sibylla was the prophetic woman of a household.

So she was probably a German woman who had been sold to a powerful man in Egypt for the guidance of his life, a woman analyst for his personal use. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 525

422 So now that the Christian point of view is no longer indubitably valid, we see that woman increases in importance and in psychological dignity.

It is the prerogative of our times to discover that woman has a psychology, and that there is another viewpoint outside the masculine world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 527

423 I think the most psychological aspect of the Reformation is that it was the reaction to the regression of Rome, which was quite serious in every respect, in morals, in art, even in the language; the humanists, for instance, began to write a curious mixture of Latin and Italian. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 527-528

424 Therefore [it is said in the Book of Revelations 3:16], “Woe unto those who are neither hot nor cold, for the Lord will spit the lukewarm ones out of his mouth.”

Those lukewarm people never constellate the opposites. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 528

425 Therefore I once said that it looked to me as if the human mind had grown out of external objects all over the world, as if our consciousness really started with the stars and not in the brain, and as if we were beginning to assimilate these psychological facts only in our time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 530

426 A medicine man is always made by projection. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 530

427 People used to say that Mars had made them angry, or Eros had pierced their heart.

But now the god of wrath is simply my own emotion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 531

428 The inhabitants of Olympus are now all integrated into my poor psyche.

That accounts for our inflation nowadays; our size has increased enormously because we are now housing the upper and lower gods. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 531

429 Human consciousness becomes almost divine, people believe that we are really on top of the world.

Instead of doubting more and more about our own identity, we really think that we are Venus and Mars and the whole astrological heavens.

We should disidentify, we should not identify with those grand powers which were once great gods worshipped in temples. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 531

430 Only when we learn that the soul or psyche is really a world with its own laws, like the world in which we live and move, can we reduce to our natural proportions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 531

431 It has been pointed out many times that the bust of Socrates looks like a faun or like Silenus; even to the people of antiquity he was of a grotesque ugliness, yet he was the father of wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 533

432 All those examples show that chthonic wisdom has always been associated with grotesque form.

And it is not only legend, itis true that the medicine man or the dwarf is especially wise. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 534

433 The spiritual contents of the cult of Attis, for instance, and of Mithra, and of the Great Mother, were taken over into Christianity.

The Great Mother became first Isis and then Mother Mary.

And Horus, and the old Asiatic priest-kings, and the Roman emperor, were all sons of God; those mystical kings were kings by the grace of God. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 536

434 The Norman style is closer to nature, the stone prevails, the buildings are more like caverns-while in a Gothic building one is hardly aware of the nature of the stone because it is transformed into a living tree, it is alive, it is permeated by the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 537

435 in the early medieval representations of Elijah’s ascent to heaven, the design is practically the same as in the representations of the god Helios taking his daily flight over the sky. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 538

436 The serpent was the sacred animal of Aesculapius, the god of the doctors, who had a famous clinic for all diseases at Epidaurus.

There a huge serpent was kept, and in the time of the great pestilence, when Diocletian was the Roman emperor, they brought that serpent-it was not a mythical serpent, it was a real snake-from Epidaurus to Rome as a sort of apotropaic charm. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 539

437 For snakelike means animal-like, and animal-like meant divine.

It was not human, therefore it was represented as divine, as the Holy Ghost was represented by a dove, or the Evangelists by their animal emblems, only one of which was human. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 539

438 So the serpent is a soul demon, and the idea is that when the doctor prepares his medicine it is human work, and it is quite nice, perfectly all right, yet it has no virtue-until the doctor’s soul demon puts at least a drop of that poison into it; then it works, then there is magic power in it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 539

439 The solar plexus has been associated with the sympathetic nervous system since times immemorial.

It is the sym-pathein which means to suffer with; sym means with, and pathein means to suffer. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 540

440 It is a Gnostic idea that Christ was the healing serpent.

His blood is the essence of his life and the healing poison for the world.

Only when Christ puts that magic drop of his essence into the chalice is the wine the blood, only then is it magic, the medicine of immortality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 541

441 So when one finds the dragon or the serpent there, one can be quite certain that it means Christ.

The Gnostic interpretation was taken over, more or less unconsciously, by the early church-at the time, for instance, when there was a very important movement of the Marcionites who were persecuted by the church as heretics.

But always the persecutor cannot help taking into his psychology a part of that which he has overcome. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 541

442 Man as he is, is the frog form of the superior man to be, of the beautiful being that is in man but that has not yet revealed itself.

We are the ugly repulsive husks that surround the golden kernel, the divine soul of man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 544

443 But wisdom begins only when one takes things as they are; otherwise we get nowhere, we

simply become inflated balloons with no feet on the earth.

So it is a healing attitude when we can agree with the facts as they are; only then can we live in our body on this earth, only then can we thrive. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 545

444 So the idea in the vision is that the medicine of redemption, which issues from the sacred chalice, is merely man as he is, incomplete, a first attempt of nature and a very embryonic attempt at that.

You see, when frogs were made man had not yet appeared; they are a sort of incipient attempt on a low cold-blooded level at the warm-blooded man-to-be. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 544-545

445 We are just like a swarm of tadpoles.

Each tadpole wants to do something, but because it is a mob of tadpoles we can do nothing; for a mob has no brain, and the so-called leaders are identical with the mob psychology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 546

446 This is again that extraordinary Gnostic idea of Jesus as the serpent in Paradise, which was considered heretic and utterly rejected by the early church.

But it never really died, it has come up again and again.

It is the Kundalini serpent, and the Kundalini is identical with the Agathodaimon, the serpent of Egypt and of the later Hellenistic syncretism of the first century before and after Christ. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 547

447 In about 1940 we shall be approaching the first stars of the next sign, Aquarius.

Of course there are no definite lines in the sky which would indicate the exact borderline but in 1940 / 1950 we shall be in the vicinity of Aquarius. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 548

448 Therefore when the spring point was in the middle of the commissura, it was the year 1500, the time of the Renaissance followed by the Reformation.

And we entered the tail of the horizontal fish in about 1720, when the French Enlightenment began, when Christianity was overthrown and the Goddess of Reason was enthroned in Paris instead. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 549

449 Man has covered the earth, and everything is subservient to him.

But we are still under the influence of the first fish, we have not yet accepted the earth, we are like spirits hovering over the earth and above ourselves.

And now we have to accept ourselves. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 549

450 We cannot conceive of matter as a spiritual entity, or even imagine that it could have a spiritual connotation or a spiritual value. It seems an absolute paradox.

But when one studies Hindu philosophy, one sees that matter, as the opposite of spirit, is really pretty much the same thing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 552

451 To us matter is exceedingly unspiritual, we always assume that it has nothing whatever to do with

spirit, but to the Indian mind this is not so; in Tantric philosophy matter and spirit are supposed to be essentially the same. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 552

452 Therefore it does not matter whether one worships the most abstract, absolutely inexplicable idea of Brahman, or the most definite statue of a god with sixteen arms; they are essentially identical. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 552

453 And so one can discover God in the perfume of flowers or even in the flavor of wine, because taste may be just as precious as hearing or seeing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 554

454 That center of the mandala is what Hindus would designate as “smaller than small yet greater than great.”

There is a text in the Upanishads: “Inside of the heart of the size of a thumb, outside covering the world on all sides two handbreadths high.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 555

455 The fate of Angelus Silesius is quite comprehensible, it could easily happen in our days.

He was overcome by the vision, and, like a medium, he expressed it, yet he was quite unable to live it humanly, to assimilate the tremendous truth he had discovered. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 557

456 He [Angelus Silesius] lived at about the same time as Jakob Boehme, the medieval mystic, who was one of the first to create a mandala consciously; he called it the reversed eye of the philosophical globe, or the mirror of wisdom. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 557

457 You see, Aesculapius was among the healers or redeemers who were human beings; he was a man-of course, a sort of semidivine personage-yet he was simply the great medicine man.

But he would not be that great medicine man if he were not a snake on the other side, because every hero is a serpent. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 558

458 So looked at from a human point of view Aesculapius was a semidivine man; looked at from the standpoint of nature he was a serpent.

His essential quality was nonhuman, it was superhuman and therefore symbolized by an animal figure. 558

459 The serpent has the meaning of the space-giving or the visibility-giving factor.

Naturally all pictures of mandalas have a certain extension, which is due to the fact that the god can only be represented in the Hindu or Tantric pictures when in the state of creation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 559

460 One has an overwhelming impression of the omnipresence of God, that All-seeing Eye of the Deity.

One gets a deep impression of the religious feeling of Islam which always seems so foreign to us, one feels a most intense endeavour to liberate the idea of the deity from the definiteness of material form.

Islam is in that respect far more advanced than Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 559-560

461 Medieval Christianity was a compromise with paganism, Catholicism is still imbued with it.

Protestantism tried to spiritualize the deity, and succeeded to such an extent that it vanished altogether. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 560

462 As long as the animus is a multitude, it cannot possibly be projected, unless one is by chance concerned with a board of trustees or some such group. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 561

463 She ought to be in relation to the animus as she ought to be the proprietor of her own shadow.

You see, people who are not in possession of their shadow, who are not aware of their inferior shadow side, may apparently be marvellously good people; one cannot discover any flaw in them, they are as white as milk. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 563

464 You can never arrive at the animus unless you see the shadow, unless you see your own inferior sides.

When you see your shadow, you can detach from the anima or the animus, but as long as you don’t see it you have not a ghost of a chance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 563

465 And the tongue, which is sharp like a knife, would be gossip, slander, public criticism or depreciation, anything that kills, so one might call this dragon another form of the animus. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 565

466 You see, the shadow is practically the same as the personal unconscious; those two concepts are more or less identical, one must allow for the fact that the personal unconscious is a sort of distortion of the shadow because it consists of repressed material. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 566

467 We usually make the mistake of assuming that the shadow coincides with our repressions, we explain it in those terms. It may be so, but it is not necessarily so.

The real evil in people is often quite different; they repress something which perhaps is not even evil, it is only a mistake, an illusion. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 567

468 The shadow is the negative of the conscious personality, but it may be much more decent and have many more positive qualities than the conscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 568

469 People say that at bottom man is good but that is not true, one could just as well say that he was the devil from the very beginning.

Are the untold millions spent for armies and weapons and poisons only because of the absence of good? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 568

470 The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacity to be perfect, the shadow descends into hell and becomes the devil.

For it is just as sinful from the standpoint of nature and of truth to be above oneself as to be below oneself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 569

471 You see, in analysis one naturally has to deal with gossip all the time, and one finds that there is usually a sting in it because it contains an element of truth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 575

472 When a woman is wedded to the animus, she is usually lifted up into a mental sphere where she is only concerned with spiritual things, as if everything could be done through a spiritual attitude.

But that is a wrong kind of spirituality, because behind it is a secret joy that she has escaped the awkward problem of the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 576

473 When women begin to think, they often dismiss the heart altogether, and if the animus functions all alone, it is as if the world contained no feeling at all, or anything like Eros. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 576

474 That is, the animus now reaches her heart, there is a union between the animus and the feeling; the animus is no longer the mere Logos function, he now contains feeling, which is a tremendous asset.

For then the woman’s thought, her conception of things, is not a mere abstraction; it is adapted and adjusted through feeling values, and that corrects the essential mistakes of the animus. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 578

475 The animus causes the illusion that a woman is absolutely given over to the spirit or the mind, while in reality she is more in the body, more swept by passion, more in the actual heat of hell than any other woman.

The so-called Eros woman may be comparatively cool beside her, even cold. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 579

476 Later on he [Saturnus] became identified with the Greek god Chronos, who was the god of creation, having exactly the meaning of what Bergson calls la duree creatrice.

So one could say that Bergson’s intuitive idea was only a recrudescence of that archetypal idea of creative time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 580

477 Occasionally a herd begins to stampede for no obvious reason, it is as if they were suddenly frightened by something.

That happens to us also; at certain moments in the midst of real nature one is suddenly seized with terror without knowing why. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 581

478 People nowadays go to the woods and the mountains just in order to become unconscious; to identify with nature is a great relief from the strain of consciousness in the life of the city. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 582

479 The Christian spirit is the Western attempt-still very modest-to deny the flesh; it is one stage on the road which the East has already accomplished, the denial of reality. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 582

480 You see that terror of nature comes, not from nature herself, but from the nature of man.

The panic terror is due to the fear of being overcome by the unconscious; it is the terror of solitude where one might really go crazy. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 582

481 Christ is the symbol of the man who shoulders the cross, who goes to his death with a deliberate consciousness, a clear conscious vision that things must be as they are and that one must accept one’s individual suffering. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 586

482 The point is that you should assimilate yourself and not project half of yourself into other people or institutions.

Of course you are far from being perfect, or perfectly conscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 585

483 In the Hindu cosmogonic myth, for instance, part of the creation of the world consists of Indra pulling up the big serpent that is deep down in the sea, and with it he pulls up the seven great treasures, enumerated as seven gods, among whom is Mani, which means the jewel in Sanskrit. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 590

484 Mani is a title of Buddha in Mahayana Buddhism, and the famous Tibetan prayer formula: Om mani padme hum, means: Oh, the jewel in the Lotus.

But the jewel Mani of the cosmogonic legend is Vedic, it is of most venerable age. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 590

485 So after the birth of Apollo the terrible dragon Python pursued him in order to swallow him.

And as soon as Christ was born, he narrowly escaped being killed by the Herodian mass murder of boys. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 591

486 That is the doubt of Nicodemus in the New Testament when he asked how a man could enter his mother’s womb a second time.

It is impossible, so that rebirth must have been against nature, and therefore nature takes her revenge.

That is the danger, and the question is how to combat the evil result.

For the birth of the redeemer means an awful catastrophe to the world because it is against nature. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 591

487 The Christian cross has the meaning of sacrifice, but this is the crux ansata, the cross with the loop, the Egyptian symbol of life.

That symbol appearing in the smoke above the crater means that this is the crater of life; it does not

mean destruction only, because the crux ansata always denotes life given by the gods, or life given by the pharoahs to the gods.

There are representations where the gods bestow life upon the pharoahs by offering them the crux ansata, or where life is offered thus by the pharoahs to the gods. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 592

488 He [Empedocles] was one of the very early Greek philosophers and a sort of savior.

He had a tremendous following; it is said that when he traveled from town to town about ten thousand people accompanied him, so he was a very famous man of those days.

And when he was old he climbed Mount Aetna and threw himself down into the crater in order to be reborn.

There we see the double meaning of the crater again in Greek legend. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 595-596

489 You know Cybele is another form of Astarte or Ishtar, the goddess of love, a goddess of Asia Minor. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 595

490 Therefore I always warn people not to use this[Yoga] Eastern method, for I have never seen a case which was not applied with the wrong purpose of getting still more on top, of acquiring more power or more control, either of their own body, or of other people, or of the world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 599

491 You see, people may have most extraordinary experiences in the course of analysis, but when they go out into the world they forget all about them.

The further they get away from that mountain the less impressive it seems, it just smokes, so they forget the experience. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 606

492 Yes, the realization of Tao has this quality of being in a sort of synchronistic relation with everything else, as if the same stream of events, or the same stream of life went through everything, so that everything has, as it were, the same rhythm, the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 608

493 Only by means of discrimination can one be conscious, whereas Tao might be formulated as the condition of things before consciousness.

So the expression, the consciousness of Tao, is paradoxical. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 609

494 Therefore Tao is the beginning of things, the mother of everything, and also the crowning effect of everything; it is the beginning and the end.

But that is what we call the unconscious, where the ego consciousness simply comes to an end. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 609

495 Jewels have always had that magic quality, and medieval science tried to find out their individual secret virtues.

Amethyst, for instance, was good to wear against getting drunk; and the opal is still not welcome because it is supposed to bring bad luck; and one must not give pearls because they bring tears. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 610

496 For instance, this ring of mine with the snake engraved on it is two thousand years old; it is the Agathodaimon, and it is also the Kundalini serpent, and it gives me special satisfaction to wear such a historical ring, it conveys a particular meaning to me.

Of course it has artistic quality and that is very interesting, but it appeals to my nocturnal side particularly,

it expresses something unconscious, and so it is thoroughly alive and full of mana. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 611

497 You know what love is long before you find out the science of love; it has its magic, its spell, despite the fact that there is no such thing in science as feeling. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 611

498 The animus in his real form is a hero, there is something divine about him, but usually we have had to deal with a very unreal animus, an opinionating substitute. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 612

499 The motif of the imprisonment of the animus has its counterpart in masculine psychology in the imprisonment of the anima, but that is naturally different in that it is concerned with emotions and moods. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 612

500 When a man is able to make a difference between the objective situation and his mood, when he no longer allows his mood to blindfold his mind, when he can set it apart, acknowledge that he has a peculiar mood, that is the beginning of the imprisonment of the anima. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 612

501 So I quite recognize what an extraordinary accomplishment it is for a woman to put the animus aside, to say: “I will put you into a test tube for later analysis.”

Now putting the thing into a test tube, or into a cauldron, is the beginning of the alchemistic procedure; the imprisonment of the animus or of the anima is for the purpose of transformation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 613

503 Don’t forget that to be possessed by the animus or the anima was the original condition of man. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 615

504 We don’t know to what extent we are possessed; it is probable that our liberation is very relative.

So the suppression of the anima or the animus is an act of extreme violence and cruelty; only by being hard and cruel can one suppress these powers even to that relative degree. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 615

505 If an American woman lived for a considerable time in Switzerland, she might acquire a Swiss animus, as a Swiss living in South America would acquire a South American anima. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 616

506 In Africa, they asked me why I came there to study the natives; they said if I studied the white man I would learn very much more.

Subsequently, that idea was absolutely confirmed. It is amazing what happens, yet it is so subtle that only the clever people who live there or imaginative writers grasp it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 617

507 So it is almost unavoidable that the animus of an American woman should be a red Indian, because he really demonstrates the American soil; he is the older man on the soil, and as the soil has fashioned him, so that fashion conquers the soil. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 618

508 The idea of souls becoming stars, or descending from the stars, is very old.

The star of Bethlehem was the soul of Christ that descended upon the earth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 635

509 You see, when a man controls his anima, or a woman her animus, they are doing a thing which nobody would dream of doing, because since the world began, mankind has been possessed.

And when you dare to dispossess yourself you get into a different order of things, which means a challenge to the old order. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 624

510 If a man makes a modest attempt at controlling his anima, he will at once be faced with a situation where he is tested to the limit; all the devils of the world will try to get into his anima in order to bring him back into the fold of Mother Nature. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 623

511 Controlling the animus or anima is like creating a vacuum; if you lift yourself out of a certain volume of space, it leaves a vacuum and everything rushes in to fill it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 624

512 A participation mystique is created through not controlling them, because one allows a piece of one’s own self to wander about, to be projected into other people, which gives one a feeling of being connected. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 624-625

513 The dwarf is always a subordinate creative power in the unconscious that may either be helpful and bring things up from the unconscious, or it may steal things away. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 626

514 You see, the power of the animus consists, as a rule, in the possession of a woman’s feeling; that is, when she is not responsible for her feeling, when she does not look out for it consciously, the animus eats it; and then he becomes powerful and may devour her or any other innocent prey. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 627

515 There are certain women who just despair because they cannot tackle the animus anywhere, he is so utterly elusive, he is surrounded by the taboo of a thing that is almost divine.

As a man is often mercilessly subjugated by his anima, because she is

equally elusive and divine; he simply cannot tackle her, for since the beginning of time he has had a system of taboos against feelings in himself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 628

516 People who are under a taboo can live along the lines that are prescribed by the taboo, but if they once break through, they can only live by the way of their consciousness.

And if they violate that way they are completely lost, for they have then violated the unconscious, the all-giving mother, and there is nothing for them any longer. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 633

517 This is because of the original fact that astrology is a projection of man’s unconscious psychology into the stars.

There is an amazing knowledge of unconscious functioning there, which we consciously do not possess, and it appeared first in the remotest stars, the stars of the zodiacal constellations. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 636

518 When I discover that my sun is in Leo and my moon in Taurus, for instance, something has been explained to me; and when I find that I have a particular touch with modern times, and the rising sign in my horizon is Aquarius, it is as if I had learned something more than I already knew of myself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 636

519 So the fact that we project something into the stars means that we must possess something of the stars.

You see, we really are part of the universe.

We must never forget that we are living on a planet, and a planet is a satellite of the sun, it is just a body moving about in space, and we are a kind of living slime on the surface of that body flying through the eternal heavens. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 637

521 So we are cosmic in every particle of our bodies, we are the dust of eternity and of limitless space.

All that is within us, and that is why we can project it, why we can perceive space at all, and why we have such ideas as infinite space or infinite time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 637

522 And so the symbol of stars falling down has the eternal meaning of the soul of man descending.

The star that appeared at the birth of Christ announced a cosmic phenomenon, a cosmic soul had descended. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 636

523 Dante had to go through fire to burn away the last remnant of earthly love; then only could he enter heaven.

So this is an outburst of passion, the wildest concupiscentia, and that will bring the eternal law down upon her.

Then she will meet her fate, then she will be in her own place, she will be exactly what she is meant to be.

Concupiscentia is the expression of the Self as long as you are in the ego-consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 638

524 One might call it the shadow of the individual monad.

For the individual could not be a reality without casting a shadow, and this casts a tremendous one. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 651

525 The Persian Zoroastrian religion is based upon the opposition between the powers of light and the powers of darkness.

And the same fundamental idea, the conflict between the light and the darkness, was taken up again in Manichaeism. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 660

526 We know very little of Manichaeism as yet, but it was once a very powerful religion in the East, and it also reached far into the West.

It was founded by Mani, a Persian, in the third century A.D. Recent German expeditions, the Turfan expedition in particular, have unearthed a number of Manichaean remains in India; and a translation of a Manichaean book into Chinese has been discovered, showing that those ideas were known as far East as China. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 660

527 In Mexico they flayed a criminal every year, and the priest then got into the skin of the flayed victim, thus representing the god.

The symbolical meaning is that man must be denaturalized in order to attain to the god.

In all religions there is the same idea of the denaturalization of man in favor of the god, that the god may be born in man, or in witness of his power, his light. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 664

528 I have told you about the Egyptian autumn festival, the day on which the left eye of the goddess is prepared for the god to enter in order to be reborn.

And that the eye is the place of rebirth is the meaning of the eye of Horus, which plays such a mystical role in Egyptian mythology. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 675

529 The word Lao-tze means “old man,” it is not his individual name,

it is a title; so she comes from the Tao-teh-king to Lao-tze. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 678

530 You know Lao-tze never wrote anything until very late in his life.

The legend is that he withdrew from his public position and went to the western slope of the mountain with a dancer, there to spend the evening of his life.

But when he felt death approaching, he left the mountain in order to disappear, and so had to pass through the western gate of the kingdom; and the officer at the gate would only let him pass under the condition that he would write a report of his wisdom to leave behind him.

It is said that Lao-tze then wrote the book of five thousand words, the Tao-teh-king.

Then he disappeared into the western land. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 679

531 The writings of Hermes Trismegistus, for instance, was a book of lost wisdom which had to be rediscovered; that also contained the great secrets, an attempt at a formulation of the ultimate truth.

There really are such ultimate truths in the so-called tabula smaragdina, the tablet of emerald,

that legacy from Hermes Trismegistus. “As above, so below” is a quotation from it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 679

532 Knowledge means power, and if that knowledge remains unconscious, it operates in the way of nature, and nature is cruel, perfectly regardless of the human being.

Nature simply seeks the shortest way, as water never considers whether its course is opportune; it chooses its own way just there whether one wants it or not. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 681

533 Wisdom and the instincts are forever the same; every word of wisdom is the truth of the instincts, it simply reveals the image which is buried behind the instincts.

Instinct is the dynamic side of the images. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 684

534 But consciousness did not come into consideration in old Egypt, there was only the consciousness of the pharaoh and of nobody else, because he was the only individual. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 684

535 Burnt offerings are the subtle bodies of the animals or the fruit that are sacrificed; the sacrificial offerings rise as smoke and as smell to the upper atmosphere where the gods are supposed to dwell. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 687

536 Everything is broken up because the vessel has a soul which goes to heaven when they break it, to meet the dead and to serve them again.

That was the origin of those terrible human sacrifices when one of the prehistoric kings of Ur died.

They discovered, in excavating, about fifty corpses of soldiers, women of the court, and slaves, who were killed in order to accompany the soul of the dead king.

The kings of the Huns were always accompanied by soldiers, slain with their horses, and buried near the king.

In Egypt human sacrifices were substituted by ushabti, small clay figures of workmen. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 688

537 Yes, whenever snakes, toads, or any such witchcraft animals are boiled or distilled or burned to ashes, it is done in order to get the essence, the spirit, one could call it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 690-691

538 The spirit of the snake is its essential magic quality, and that quality is the power of rebirth; they are supposed by many primitive tribes to be immortal on account of the fact that they can shed their old skins, thus apparently acquiring a new life every year. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 691

539 It is the age-old truth that a true religion, expressed by a true symbol, works magic; it has mana, it is convincing, it is the expression of the power of life.

But if the symbol no longer conveys life, it is as if the mana fell out of that form and existed all by itself, and then it immediately degenerates into low forms like witchcraft. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 693

540 The early Taoism of Lao-tze is a marvellous philosophy, and also the Taoism of Chuang-tze two hundred years later, but in the course of the centuries it degenerated slowly into the most absurd sorcery, so Taoists fifty or a hundred years ago were the lowest kind of ordinary tricksters or swindlers.

Of course, among them and behind them were true Taoists, and in recent years there has been a religious movement in China which is a very curious parallel to what is going on in Europe, namely, the decay of the official church-in China that would be the decay of Confucianism-and a return to Taoism in a renewed and far more positive form. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 693

541 In the course of history, one repeatedly sees the contamination of the very high symbol with the low magic performances, as if it were sucking up all the low magic; then when the symbol becomes lame, outworn, when it no longer holds the forces of life, it immediately sinks down and takes on the lower forms again.

In Christianity the critical time was reached in the time of the Reformation when the great schism occurred; then witchcraft and sorcery, black magic in all forms, sprang up. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 693

542 Trials for witchcraft appeared only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in that critical time of the transition of the universal church, but ever since, such side developments have become more and more manifest. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 693

543 Nowadays we are investigating all that very freely, we discuss the possible truth in dreams and visions, but that is all wrong from the historical point of view.

It is a symptom of the fact that the mana, or the magic power of life, has left the symbol. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 694

544 Magic has always been the source of science; science developed out of magic, not out of religion.

Religion is too complete, but magic is very incomplete. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 694

545 If you can be conscious of the stream of life, if you see how the whole thing moves, you are naturally at variance with things; otherwise you could not be conscious…Nothing is more deadly than to be always in harmony with things, it kills one, but to feel at least a difference, or really a conflict, is refreshing. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 696

546 Have you noticed that in the whole of the New Testament nothing is said about the fate of animals when they die, excepting in one rather hidden allusion? What happens to your faithful dogs, or to your horses?

In just one place, St. Paul speaks to the Apostles of the apokatastasis, the reinstatement or redemption of all creatures. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 698

547 The idea is that all creatures are lying in fetters with us, and as we, the children of God, are expecting the revelation of the Holy Ghost within us, so the whole of nature is expecting that spiritual miracle; as man will be redeemed ultimately, so the nature of the animals will be redeemed too. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 698

548 In the Christian religion the sacrifice of the lamb was merely metaphorical; what was meant was the human sacrifice, or the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice of God’s only Son.

While in the Mithraic religion it is true that the bull is in a way Mithra himself, yet it is decidedly a bull. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 700

549 You have probably read in The Secret of the Golden Flower that at a certain stage of the yoga practice, the state of concentration and contemplation, the constituents of the unconscious mind begin to dissociate, they split up into a series of figures. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 706

550 It could be the diamond center, or the jewel in the Lotus, and the jewel in the Lotus is the child Buddha.

On the third day after his birth he stepped into the Lotus in order to announce the law to the worlds here and beyond. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 708

551 Thought, the product of man, is like a flower, so she is a plantlike form holding up the flower of thought, and that is the idea of the diamond center; it is the Lotus or the Golden Flower. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 708

552 All nature was teeming with life, and with a life which was darkly felt to be their own.

It was as if the nervous system had tentacles in objects, as if

the nerves were not only under the skin but extended far into the outside world. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 739

553 A symbol is not its contents, they are not identical; the symbol is a man-made image, an honest attempt of man to express a certain influence or impression, a strange psychical experience; just as all the terrible Greek monsters, like the chimera, were attempts of man to characterize certain specific local impressions. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 740

554 One must always make that difference between the contents and the symbolic form. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 743-744

555 Suppose you are in a haunted house or a place that has a spell, and are caught by it; you behave queerly, you get pale and tremble, you are under the spell of the place.

That is the lived archetype. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 744

556 And the same thing happens here, people often come to me for one consultation, just wanting to hear the name of their disease.

I tell them it is a compulsion neurosis, for instance, and they walk away and pay me a fee.

As if they knew what a compulsion neurosis was! ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 746

557 You see, that is the lived archetype, and it has always been so.

For instance, the old Gnostics must have searched the Orient in order to find the extraordinary names they use in their strange invocations to the deity If they called God JaldabaothJao, or Abrasax, or Chnoubis, or Aeeie, or Arioriph, instead of the ordinary Javeh or Theos, they thought he would be more likely to listen. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 747

558 Now if you can accept that shadow, which apparently was the non-ego, you will encounter more of the real non-ego in your later development. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 749

559 A dream of a little child, for instance, may contain something which the child does not know, and will recognize only very much later; it may forecast his whole future life.

Now that material comes from the collective unconscious, and most definitely not from the personal unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 750

560 Then you must assume that your ego is exceedingly extended in time, and that means in space also, so you reach a conception of the ego which is absolutely inconceivable; it reaches out to such an extent that you are everything, you are the creator himself, you are time and space.

But the result is that you get an enormous inflation; it is a neurotic condition. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 750

561 For most people are still wrestling with their shadows; they have not experienced the fact that their shadows are real, they have the greatest trouble to see this.

But only when they are able to see this can they encounter the wider non-ego. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 752

562 Therefore Buddhism holds that you can never attain to redemption, whatever you do, you must first grow up to it; even Buddha himself had to go through more than five hundred incarnations in order to attain to nirvana. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 753

563 So the Self is part of the collective unconscious, but it is not the collective unconscious; it is that unit which apparently comes from the union of the ego and the shadow. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

564 We can never say: “I know this Self of mine.” We don’t know it, we can never know it because it is the bigger circle that includes the smaller circle of our consciousness.

Just as the Self is a unit in the collective unconscious, so we are units in the Self.

And how can we know the whole of which we are only a part? ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 754

565 When, however, one is beyond the personal, when one foot is, as it were, in another type of living, the aim of such a life can be discussed with more intelligence and with a better result. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 756

567 You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 757-758

568 Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life makes the individual appear.

You cannot individuate, for instance, by locking yourself up in a cell, you can only individuate in your concrete life, you appear in your deed; there you can individuate and nowhere else. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 758

569 Real consciousness can only be based upon life, upon things experienced, but talking about these things is just air.

It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation. Individuation is the accomplishment through life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 758

570 Individuation is not to be considered as a preparation.

Individuation is the law of your life, life in every stage is it, and it is not to be understood as a preparation. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 758

571 Life is an eternal cycle, it is in every moment-there are always people dying or being born and people living.

So one really could not say that individuation was a preparation, it is also the real end; it is both the beginning and the end of life, it is the process of life itself. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 758

572 A plant that is meant to produce a flower is not individuated if it does not produce a flower, it must fulfill the cycle; and the man that does not develop consciousness is not individuated, because consciousness is his flower, it is his life, it belongs to our process of individuation that we shall become conscious. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 759

573 One is always looking forward, the pleasure is always in anticipation, and in the meantime one lives the provisional life; that is Happy Neurosis Island, where the great thing is still ahead. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 759

574 But the great thing is here and now, this is the eternal moment, and if you do not realize it, you will have missed the best part of life.

You will have missed the realization that you are the carrier of a life contained between the poles of an unimaginable future and an unimaginably remote past. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 759

575 To look at life as a mere preparation for things to come is like not enjoying your meal while it is hot. That is really the disease of our time. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 760

576 One should take each moment as the eternal moment, as if nothing were ever going to change, not anticipating a faraway future.

For the future always grows out of that which is, and it cannot be sound if it grows in morbid soil; if we are morbid and don’t feel this here and now, we shall naturally build up a sickly future. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 760

577 You must live life in such a spirit that you make in every moment the best of the possibilities. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 760

578 So if one is allowed to speak of complete individuation at all, I should say that it would be a conscious experience of the totality of nature.

But such a thing is only possible if the individual in every moment of existence fulfills his complete being, lives the primitive pattern, fulfills all the expectations that he was originally born with. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 760

579 What is the most supreme experience to one part of the personality is the most terrible destruction to another part; the spiritual beauty kills the beauty of the life of the earth, and the beauty of the earth kills the spirit.

This is an eternal truth. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 763

580 Like the relationship of John the Baptist to Christ. John the Baptist was born six months before Christ, which would be the time of the summer solstice, and John says of

Christ: “He must grow but I must decrease.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 764

581 There are certain people whose individual task is not the ordinary personal life; sometimes a person is meant to be a monk, for instance. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 771

582 Buddha began his career as a worldly man and was later converted to Brahmanistic asceticism; he became a fakir, a saint, and mortified his body for many years, until he experienced enlightenment.

Then suddenly he understood that that was wrong.

And it was at that time that he preached his famous sermon in the garden of the gazelles at Benares. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 773

583 Those are old Egyptian concepts: the ka soul is the substantial terrestrial soul; and

the ba soul, represented as a bird-man, or a bird with a human head, is the spiritual soul.

They are like the kuei and the shen in Chinese metaphysics, which separate after death, the kuei being the physical soul and the shen the spiritual soul.

The kuei is the ghost-being that precedes or follows death, and the shen disappears into the Yang principle, one could say; it goes up to the light, to the spiritual worlds. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 778

584 The ka is supposed to be a sort of heavy substance and therefore the dead were given a little ladder in order to climb out of the grave and up over the horizon into heaven; the ka is supposed to remain in the grave as a ghost, it hovers round until it decays in the wind and rain and air. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 778

585 Yes, an animus form appearing under the disguise of a god, as the animus can easily do because of his divine qualities.

It is owing to these divine qualities that women are so completely under the spell of the animus, utterly helpless victims of his power, and of course the more they identify with him the more they are done for.

The same thing is true of the anima. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 778

585 And so it is with the animus and the anima.

They are divine as the ancient deities were divine, having the quality of being beyond good and evil. They can never be envisaged from any moral point of view. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 779

586 You see, a great symbol is an entirely collective thing.

The animus alone can never produce it; what he brings up is merely an approach, or an approximate attempt, at creating something like the symbol. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 781

587 Whenever the earth mother appears it means that things are going to happen in reality; this is an absolute law.

Therefore she is the Greek goddess of the underworld, Hecate, which means the one whose arrows reach one from afar.

She is a moon goddess, the goddess of all things dark and uncanny, and of fear, fear of the actual happening. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 790

588 If that eye containing the seed is in the possession of the earth mother, it will grow in reality, and whatever that tree means or has led to, whatever the Great Mother insinuates, will come to her in real life. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 790-791

589 You know I explained that first heavenly mother in blue as a spiritual form, referring

to the air element into which the patient was first taken up; that is, she experienced first by thought and by intuitions, and therefore the blue mother was associated with white birds. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 792

590 And the fourth is always the devil; there is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, and the fourth figure in heaven is the devil.

A hell, a separate asylum was made for him, and we always forget that he is an important member of that company in heaven. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 795

591 Hell is a great distillation apparatus-inasmuch as it is not a permanent institution. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 795

592 Here I can only contribute a statement made by Tacitus that the Germanic women were all very wise and gifted with second sight, so it is possible that in very ancient times, perhaps in the time of a matriarchy, women had a greater influence on the formation of the myths. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 798

593 That is perfectly true, it is the specific difference; the corresponding experience of a man is always the conception, receiving the seed as if he were a woman, but his brain is his womb.

With a woman it is very different; she gives her eye as the seed and the goddess takes it. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 798

594 Later on in history one sees that the Germanic women definitely influenced the fairy tales, which are really old myths; all the famous German fairy tales were made by women, they are full of feminine symbolism. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 798-799

595 So I think that in those very remote times, feminine psychology played a great role, and it is quite possible that the Wotan myth is a remnant of the original feminine imagination, which was then transformed by poets, men who had heard such stories from their mothers. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 799

596 The first center of objective consciousness, where you can see that you are under an emotion.

People who are just moody or grouchy are in manipura, but those who say: “Don’t talk to me, I am grouchy today,” are in anahata; that is just the difference. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 802

597 This is symbolized in the chakras by the fact that you can see the Purusha, that is the characteristic feature of the three upper chakras; while in the lower three you are nothing but ego in the clutch of elementary powers.

Above the diaphragm you become aware of the Purusha, the Theos Anthropos, the god-man, Adam Kadmon. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 803

598 It is most interesting that Christ, who was called Theou hyios, the son of god, called himself the son of man; it is exactly the idea of the Purusha; if there is any doubt as to

the possible Indian influence on Christianity, the proof of the influence might be just there-that Christ designated himself as the son of the Purusha. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 803

599 The child is the beginning, and it is first in the form of a seed or an egg; then in the water, in svadhisthana, it grows; in the fire it develops; and out of the fire-or the smoke-of manipura, rises the subtle body, the Purusha. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 803

600 Yes, the child has grown into a peculiar tree which is human above and snake below who will surely poison you.

That is the manipura condition; when you have that point of view, you are inside of the monster.

But when you come through the diaphragm you are outside of the monster, and then

you can see that what really held you was that divine being, which appeared to you, when looked at from the inside, as a big snake. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 806